Riddle of the sexes solved!

Women marry, men cohabit and serial
relationships are lousy for everybody -- except men

By Owen Dyer

Breaking up is hard to do, but perhaps not quite so hard if you're a man, according to results of the annual British Household Panel Survey published in the British Medical Journal. The survey, which began in 1991, includes information supplied yearly from a representative sample of 5,000 British households and 10,000 adults.

The study set out "to describe the mental health of men and women with differing histories of partnership transitions." A total of 4,430 men and women under the age of 65 answered a validated mental health questionnaire and results were compared to the history of their relationships.

This is not the first attempt to study this problem statistically, but previous research has usually failed to take a longitudinal perspective capable of assessing the impact of serial break-ups and remarriages. Moreover, while previous work has often shown that married people are happier and suffer fewer mental health problems than singles, there was no way to be sure that marriage led to sound mental health and happiness, rather than the other way around. By taking the whole life history of subjects and reviewing their mental health through various stages of celibacy and partnership, the authors hoped to eliminate that selection bias.

This study is also one of the few to consider cohabitation as a "third way," distinct from marriage and celibacy. In the event, the researchers found important differences between marriage and living together.

Nine percent of the sample had been single throughout their lives. Over half of both men and women in the sample had started one cohabitation or marriage during their lifetime and it was still ongoing. Just over a third had experienced at least one partnership split during their life course. Of these, 30% were still alone at the time of questioning, while 70% had remarried or begun another cohabitation. A few had gone on through several relationships.

Men and women who had undergone one partnership split fared significantly worse in the mental health questionnaire than those who were still in their first partnership or who had always been single. Oddly, however, the best mental health was observed in men who had undergone two or more partnership reformations, and this was significantly better than all other men.

Women's mental health appeared to suffer from serial relationships. Both sexes tended to benefit from remarriage or re-cohabiting, but the authors noted that "for women, the ability of partnership reformation to overcome the negative mental health outcomes associated with partnership splits reduced in accordance with the number of splits already encountered."

As for the difference between marriage and living together, it emerged that among people still in their first relationship, men were healthiest if that partnership was one of cohabitation, while women fared best in a formal marriage. Men who split from a relationship and remain single have the poorest mental health of all. But among those who find a second partner, men who cohabit in that second relationship appear to be much happier than those who remarry.

In general, the most depressed subjects were those who had recently split and had yet to find a new partner. But when such people did find a new relationship, men tended to bounce back to a healthy mental state much faster than women. "In contrast," said the authors, "women's mental health did not seem to recover from their last partnership split, irrespective of the length of time since it occurred." Women who have split from several partners appear to show steadily worsening mental health in the long term. On the other hand, the authors conceded, it may be that women with poor mental health are more likely to experience multiple break-ups.