The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study by Howard S. Friedman Ph.D. & Leslie R. Martin Ph.D

Author:Howard S. Friedman Ph.D. & Leslie R. Martin Ph.D. [Friedman Ph.D., Howard S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

Which Women Lived Longest?

Ever unpredictable, the women in the Terman study showed fascinating and unexpected results. Like their male counterparts, steadily married women lived somewhat longer lives than those women who had divorced and then remarried. The surprise emerged for women, like Barbara, who had gotten divorced and not remarried. These women didn’t fare nearly as badly as did their divorced male peers. They usually lived long lives. That is, a surprising number of the women who divorced their husbands and then stayed single did fine—on average they lived nearly as long as their steadily married counterparts.

Being divorced was much less harmful to women’s health than it was to men’s health. This surprising finding, which had never been given much consideration before, raised many more questions about whether poor marriages could damage women’s health so much that they would be better off unmarried. One thing we now knew was that simple advice to “get married to live longer” was surely flawed and incomplete.

The steadily single women were of intermediate risk. They didn’t live as long as the steadily married women, but they outlived those who married and divorced and then remarried. As we later discovered, women who could thrive in a good marriage tended to stay especially healthy, but many of the rest were better off single.

As we thought more about the Terman men and women, we were pondering the H. L. Mencken saying: “Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later. For another thing, they die earlier.”53 Maybe Mencken was right but for the wrong reasons.

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