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Scientists have proven the benefits of marriage
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
If you conduct a small survey to find out whether marriage is good for your health, you will probably find a lot of opinions, but there will still be two main categories of opinions: those who will argue that marriage has a good effect on the health of both men and women, and those who will smash the beneficial effect of a stamp in the passport to smithereens. But a new study by scientists will help put an end to these disputes, who found that women who are married are less prone to depression and this effect can last for several years.
Experts have found that pregnant women who are already married are less likely to suffer from postnatal depression than those who live with a partner in a common-law marriage.
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More than 6,000 women took part in the study, using which the experts tried to find out all the benefits of entering into a legal relationship.
Experts have found that women who cohabit with a man but are not in a marriage relationship are more likely to suffer from partner violence and also abuse alcohol or take drugs.
"We have tried for the first time to assess the impact of the duration of cohabitation outside of marriage and found that the shorter the duration of cohabitation, the higher the likelihood that women suffer from partner violence, as well as alcohol and drug addiction, and the risk of postpartum depression increases," comments the study's lead author Marcelo Urquia from the University of Toronto. "We did not see a similar picture among women in legal relationships with spouses. They were more psychologically stable and the duration of cohabitation did not matter in this case."
Researchers found that 20% of unmarried women who had lived with their common-law spouses for less than two years suffered from at least one of the above problems, but the longer couples lived together, the less often they had quarrels in the family and the fewer problems arose.
For women who had never married and remained single, the figure was 35%.
The highest percentage of women with postpartum depression was among divorced women and those who lived separately from their spouse. Postpartum depression especially affected those who separated from their spouse less than twelve months before the birth of the child. Such women accounted for 67%.
And married women were the least affected by these problems, including postpartum depression. Women in legal relationships suffered from such problems less often - only 10.6% experienced stress and certain difficulties.
Scientists conducted this study to determine all the positive and negative aspects of marriage, because at the moment more and more couples do not legalize their relationship and have children without being married. In Canada alone, this figure was 30%. For comparison, in 1971, only 9% of children were born out of wedlock.
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