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Health

Marriage, like other close relationships, exerts considerable influence on health. Married people experience lower morbidity and mortality across such diverse health threats as cancer, heart attacks, and surgery. Research on marriage and health is part of the broader study of the benefits of social relationships.

Social ties provide people with a sense of identity, purpose, belonging, and support. Simply being married, as well as the quality of one's marriage, have been linked to diverse measures of health.

The health-protective effect of marriage is stronger for men than women. Marital status—the simple fact of being married—confers more health benefits to men than women.

Women's health is more strongly impacted than men's by marital conflict or satisfaction, such that unhappily married women do not enjoy better health relative to their single counterparts. Most research on marriage and health has focused on heterosexual couples; more work is needed to clarify the health impacts of same-sex marriage.