Marriage certainly doesn’t guarantee a life full of bliss, but it does, despite all its challenges, tend to keep both partners healthier than their single friends. People in marital relationships, especially good, satisfying ones, live longer lives and have a reduced likelihood of dying from heart disease, cancer or other major killers. Married men and women suffer less from back pain, headaches, serious psychological distress and fare better on depression tests than when they were single. On the other hand, when those protective bonds of marriage break, either through death or divorce, it can cause not only a great deal of pain and emotional suffering but a detrimental impact on health. In fact, a new study shows that the effects can be so traumatic that even remarriage isn’t enough to reverse the toll. To try to find out how people fare after the loss of a spouse, sociologist Linda Waite, director of the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging, and colleague Mary Elizabeth Hughes, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, examined a study of Americans interviewed in 1992, when they were 51 to 61 years of age. They focused on a sample of 8,652 people, adjusting their statistics to account for factors that could skew the results, such as race and gender. They found that those with “marital loss”—losing a partner to death or divorce—had 20 percent more chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer, and 23 percent more conditions that limited their mobility, such as trouble climbing stairs or walking a block, than married people. The results were the same for men and women, and for emotional well-being as well as physical health. People who went on to remarry lessened some of the negative health effects, but were still in generally poorer health than those in a lasting marriage. “Losing a marriage or becoming widowed or divorced is extremely stressful,” Waite said. “It’s financially, sometimes, ruinous. It’s socially extremely difficult. What’s interesting is if people have done this and remarried, we still see, in their health, the scars or marks—the damage that was done by this event.” Those who did not remarry after a divorce or a spouse’s death were the biggest losers—having worse health indicators than people who never married. Waite called this the “double whammy” because they don’t reap the protective effects of marriage and have gone through a “damaging, health-destroying experience.” Waite says it isn’t clear whether marital loss directly affects health or if some other mechanism, such as stress, is at the root of the problem. “We argue that losing a marriage through divorce or widowhood is extremely stressful and that a high-stress period takes a toll on health,” she said. “Think of health as money in the bank,” she added. “Think of a marriage as a mechanism for ‘saving’ or adding to health. Think of divorce as a period of very high expenditures.” In previous research, Waite says she basically compared married and unmarried people at one point in time and showed that marriage generally bestows a wide array of economic and emotional advantages on couples. She says her new research offers a more varied view of the lifetime effect of marriage. “What we are doing here,” she says, “is looking at peoples’ history. Given their current status, does their history make a difference?” Waite says her future research will try to nail down the exact effects marital loss has on the body: Does blood pressure go up? Do eating habits get worse? What about dangerous inflammation in the body? One well documented bereavement process when one spouse dies is called the “broken-heart syndrome,” where the surviving partner loses the will to live and a lot of their systems shut down. They become more vulnerable to all sorts of infectious agents, as their immune system isn’t working properly, and usually contract something like pneumonia and die very quickly. The current study findings are to appear in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.