Marriage
Being legally married, as against not being married. Most health studies compare married people with the widowed, divorced or never married.
Surveys and registries record marital status at a point in time. Married is the usual comparison group, and unmarried bundles people who never married, who divorced, and who were widowed. Widowhood on this atlas is the death of a spouse. Marital satisfaction is how happy a couple is. Marriage here is the legal status, not the quality of the relationship.
Also called being married, married status, marital status.
Connected relationships
Meta-analysis · Moderate
Marriage→All-cause mortality
Higher marriage decreases all-cause mortality.
In a pooled analysis of studies of older people, married people had a lower relative risk of death than people who were not married (0.88). The non-married group mixed the widowed, the divorced or separated, and the never married.