Getting Married and (Not) Getting Healthy

The assumption that if you get married, you will get healthier is so much a part of our conventional wisdom that it is rarely challenged. Back when I was just practicing single life and not studying it, I had no idea that
the supposed truism was actually a myth. I figured that out fast, though, once I started going to the original research reports and scrutinizing them. I drew from what I had learned from decades of doing research and teaching graduate courses in research methods, but some of the mental errors in the claims about the research are so egregious that you should not need any formal training to realize how ridiculous they are.

My first comprehensive debunking of the claims about getting married and getting healthy were published in the second chapter of Singled Out. There I describe what is wrong with the research behind those claims, and take a close look at some examples of different kinds of research. Maybe because it was the first time I was spelling it all out, even for myself, that is still, after all these years, my favorite debunking of the myths about getting married.

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