The concept that married people live longer is interesting. I'm sure there is some merit to the idea that if you're married there is someone there to nag you about going to the doctor, but I think much larger factors are having the finances of dual incomes and access to an immediate support person.
Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.
You can prop it up as the benefits of marriage, but I think there's a much deeper discussion to be had about how we've built society around marriage as an inevitable conclusion and neglected to build support systems that function outside of romantic pairings.
thinking about this further, people often cite this as a sort of See It's Better To Be Married and mostly accept it as a fact that being married is better for you overall and proceed to breakdown why marriage leads to longer lives. Instead I think we need to be looking at why the system is failing single people and what we could do to close that gap. What structural societal changes can we make to help single people rather than treat it as a Well Obviously foregone conclusion that everyone will eventually pair up.
It's not Why Are Married People Healthier? It's Why Aren't Single People as Healthy? And then actually examine the causes rather than hand waving it away with whichever stereotype of being single or half remembered memory of the last time you were single in your early 20s.
You're absolutely right that dual incomes probably help, though a lot of marriages may not have that and there's the stress of unpaid work, but most commonly, the explanation I see for 'married people live longer' is far and wide 'someone is looking for them.'
If at home is out of reach of a phone and has a heart attack, a fall, a stroke, a freak accident: they are not getting help until someone finds them.
If someone lives home alone, it may be a full day or more before help comes. Most emergency conditions are fatal by that point.
But if you're married, your spouse will probably notice if you get up in the middle of the night and never come back to bed. They are more likely to hear a sudden fall, or to at least find you within a few hours when they come home from work. They may notice strange behavior that may indicate a stroke, and if they notice in under 24 hours it may be reversed.
Someone living alone having a stroke may not be able to leave their bed. They will not be found until someone comes looking for them. Their work will assume they're ditching, and only call in for a wellness check if they think that's out of character Classmates will assume they're sick or something came up. Maybe they call their family once a week and the lack of communication will be noticed.
But someone who lives with you will notice you can't get out of bed and will call you an ambulance.
It's not that married people live longer: people who live with other people live longer.
I mean this isn't just a straight forward one contributing factor by any means. Living with people who know your habits can help, but we've also just built a lot of walls of isolation into society as a whole that make health and life more difficult for individuals who don't participate in a romantic relationships.
Getting paid leave to take care of a sick roommate isn't often allowed, but if it's your spouse or significant other, your employer is more willing to accommodate that. Bereavement leave is for close relatives not friends or roommates. You can connect your spouse to insurance. Your sibling, parent, and bestie don't qualify.
There are a lot of very specific ways in which marriage specifically is accommodated that benefit all those involved in ways other relationships aren't recognized. Living with anyone changes things from living alone, but there's more going on than just that.
It is also not just the actual statistics on life expectancy rates, but also the way we as a society only discuss them in relation to marriage when we want to make a point about the institution as a whole and often that is as a gesture towards it as confirmation that that is the correct thing to do.
