Alternative Health Blog

Picking up from Tuesday’s post, let’s take a few more looks at Stress and the Single Life. As a psychology professor at Loyola University in Chicago, Maryse Richards has intensely studied the family dynamic. What she has found time and again is that married women who work are under considerably more stress than married men who work. 

OK, you can stop nodding your heads now or saying, “well, duh, who is this blogger guy, anyway?” While you might find women who anecdotally say they feel more stress than their husbands or male live-in partners, whether the couple has kids or not, Richards found a distinct pattern throughout a number of studies. Here’s the basic finding: When men come home from a day’s work, home seems to them a place of relaxation and decompressing. When a woman arrives at the house or apartment, she’s typically more stressed during the evening and even weekend hours focused on such household matters as what’s for dinner, how to keep the place clean, who needs to be where when.

Remember this holds for whether those two-job couples have kids or not, and it doesn’t matter what age the kids might be. Even social calendars can be stressful, and we all know women handle those details, sometimes because they like that control and other times because Mr. Hubby Man over there isn’t about to go anywhere by choice except to the video store on Friday nights.

In one study, Richards  and a colleague followed 55 suburban married couples with adolescent children.  They beeped family members at random times of the day; the family members were then asked to record their feelings, who they were with, etc. Among many findings: The happier families skewed to the ones in which the husband/father pitched in during the dinner hour crunch.

So that’s two hints for guys that outdistance any Valentine’s Day bouquet or dark chocolate collection (look for an upcoming post on The Dark (and Healthy) Side of Chocolate). Help your partner with social planning and, don’t just sit or stand there, do something constructive to get dinner on and off the table.

While she didn’t set out to make the case, Richards’ research points to the potential for less everyday stress in the life of a single woman. Home is likely more a haven to those women, but without studies you might also imagine some women who live alone still stress some about a clean place. An older single woman, just like her male counterpart, might stress a bit about financial security in later years—and it’s fiscally and physically healthy to have some focus and concern on the topic. Yet the guess here is worrying about what’s for dinner is a non-issue.

Of course, being a single mother can present its own share of stresses. Some research points to the single mom as the most stress of all adults, but other findings say, not so fast, we need more studies. 

A 2008 study of more than 100,000 people across Europe shows that marriage helps husbands to live an extra 1.7 years, but reduces a wife’s lifespan by 1.4 years on average. That’s nearly a swing of 1,100 days if you are counting along at home (or work or the coffee shop or where you are reading). The new study is one of several recent research projects that challenge the long-held finding that married people live longer than divorced or single individuals.

The German professor and lead author, Stefan Felder of Mageburg Univeristy, speculated that, no surprise to Maryse Richards, that the dual role of working woman and household leader is a key element in married women dying younger than single women in their age bracket. Felder said another factor is women tend to mimic the behavior of their male partners.

Now that’s a scary thought.

But what Felder and his colleagues found is single women tend to be non-smokers more often than single. So more non-smoking women marry smoker men and in significant numbers take up the tobacco habit. Of course, they are also exposed to passive or secondhand smoke, which is not healthy for any of us, single or married, calm or stressed out.

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.