Singles Sleep Better

It's National Singles Week! Happy holidays to all you Singletude readers and to the 96 million Americans who live without the help (or hindrance) of a spouse every day and are just as happy, healthy, and wise as their coupled counterparts! A special shout out to those who are not just unmarried but unattached, standing totally on their own, since we know that discrimination against singles is social as often as legal.

In honor of National Singles Week, Singletude is holding its first ever giveaway contest! The drawing is quickly approaching on 9/28, so make sure your entries are in by 9/27. The prize is a gift basket overflowing with more than $150 in prizes sponsored by SingleEdition.com, so hurry and submit your entry before time runs out. Now, on to today's topic...

If you've been single for awhile, the days of sharing your bed may be like a distant dream or, more accurately, a distant nightmare. Ah, yes, now it all comes back to you! Tossing and turning while your bedmate's snore drowns all but the sound of your teeth grinding in the dark. Quivering in the frigid night air as you cling to the four square inches of blanket that your beloved spared you. Rousing from your happy place again so you can make way for your honey to reach the lamp, the tissues, the water, or the slippers. Jerking awake as your sweetheart's alarm blasts the robins right out of the trees outside. Stumbling out of bed on jello limbs that lost their circulation beneath someone else's butt, your shoulder cradling your neck, which can't stand up straight after eight hours wedged over someone else's arm. You call it "The Quasimodo in the Morning Show."

A couple of weeks ago, a commenter called Autonomous on the blog Onely directed readers to a BBC News article entitled "Bed Sharing 'Bad for Your Health.'" The article reports on research by Dr. Neil Stanley of the U.K., who found that sleeping with someone (in the literal sense) increases sleep disturbances by 50%. This makes sense, he says, because our ancestors only recently traded their single straw mats for cushy queen-size mattresses. We weren't really meant to sleep together at all! So, presumably, the single state confers a great advantage in the bedroom that most couples miss out on. This advantage has far-reaching effects, too. As the article notes, sleep problems are associated with heart disease, stroke, depression, and, yes, even divorce, among other potentially fatal consequences. So...does this mean we can say that singles are healthier than marrieds?

If so, the media doesn't want us to know about it. While the major news outlets are all too happy to showcase studies claiming that married women sleep better than singles or that married couples have lower blood pressure during sleep, they're less eager to report findings that indicate singles might be better off. Besides the Huffington Post, no prominent American news site featured Stanley's research even though it's not unheard of for American news shows, papers, and web sites to run stories on medical breakthroughs in the international community. If Autonomous hadn't spotted it, I would've missed it altogether. My Google newsreader didn't pick it up, and, to my knowledge, it didn't make the rounds of hub sites where it might've caught the eyes of readers checking their email or the daily forecast. So why no love for this story from the American media? Is it possible that the powers that be in the U.S. want to suppress research that doesn't cast marriage or intensive coupling traditions in a flattering light? Research that indicates remaining single can be not only as healthy as but healthier than pairing off?

British sociologist Dr. Robert Meadows was also quoted in the article as saying, "People actually feel that they sleep better with a partner, but the evidence suggests otherwise." Years of drumming biased headlines into people's sleepy heads have obviously hypnotized them to believe that significant others glued to their sides are always better for their health, even when their own bodies scream otherwise in the morning. The article states that a mere 8% of forty- and fiftysomething couples sleep alone. (Statistics for other ages weren't recorded.) The other 92% apparently suffer through night after night of disrupted sleep. And for what? The perception that couples should sleep side by side because they must never be apart? Are we so entrapped by The Cult of the Couple that we would sacrifice our rest and ultimately our health because society dictates that those who have sex together must sleep together?

Undoubtedly, some people enjoy whispering in the dark, drifting off to sleep in another's arms, rolling over into a warm, inviting body on a cold night. But just as undoubtedly there are people who would always or at least sometimes prefer "to have a cuddle and then...toddle off down the landing," as Stanley puts it. If this study is accurate, most of them, like it or not, will share their beds anyway.

Luckily, we singles don't have to lose sleep over matrimaniacally approved sleeping habits! During National Singles Week, as on every night, we get to...

...decide when bedtime is.
...indulge in whatever bedtime rituals we prefer such as reading, watching TV, or having a hot drink.
...choose what goes into and what stays out of the bed including food, books, laptops, phones, pillows, blankets, real animals, and animals of the stuffed variety.
...adjust sleeping conditions like temperature, amount of light, and background noise as needed.
...sleep anywhere in the bed in any position, occupying as much space as desired.
...sleep through the whole night completely undisturbed by another human being.
...decide when to wake up and what to wake up to, whether an alarm, music, cell phone, TV, dog or cat, morning songbirds, or pure silence.

On that note, I think I'll turn in early!


Do you prefer to sleep by yourself or with someone else? Why? Have you ever had trouble sleeping with someone else? If so, why? What things do you like about sleeping alone? Did you know about the British sleep study before you read about it here? If so, where did you hear about it? Why do you think the media didn't publicize this study as much as some others that promote marriage and/or diminish singles?


Fun Link of the Day


Do you have a question for Clever Elsie about some aspect of the single life? Have an unpublished rant or rave about singlehood? Write in, and you just might see your question in a "Singletude Q&A" or your rant or rave in a "Singletude Sound-off"! Singletude makes every effort to republish submissions in their original form but reserves the right to edit your submission for length and clarity.

"Marry Well for Better Health" by Dr. Christopher Lillis: A Singletude Response

Those of you who perused last Sunday's edition of "Singles in the News" may remember the article "Marry Well for Better Health" by Dr. Christopher Lillis, which sent me into spasms of singlist-inspired horror. To quote from the Singletude summary:

Written by a doctor who is a self-described "very biased" newlywed (and takes pride in his prejudice, too), it trots out unidentified research studies to "confidently make this claim. Married men survive longer and live healthier lives than their single or divorced counterparts." Although the author admits those results were contingent on how happy the marriage was and cautions single men not to grab the nearest woman and drag her to the altar, he'd still rather advance his pet theory about the miracle drug of marriage than present hard evidence.

So, Dr. Lillis tosses out a few health measures on which married people score well while failing to mention the measures on which singles score better. (Oh, sorry. He mentions one such measure--obesity--but dismisses it since he's sure his new bride will nag him to lose weight. Let's catch up with him in 10 years and see how that's working out, shall we?)

He also neglects to inform his impressionable readers that, in many cases, the differences that do exist between marrieds and singles who have never married are marginal. If anything, he exaggerates the differences by lumping in people who have always been single with those who are divorced or widowed, two groups that sometimes do show a marked difference on health measures as compared to marrieds. (Singletude's information, by the way, comes from the CDC study "Marital Status and Health: United States, 1999-2000" by Charlotte A. Schoenborn and "Is There Something Unique About Marriage? The Relative Impact of Marital Status, Relationship Quality, and Network Social Support on Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mental Health" by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, et al., discredited here by Dr. Bella DePaulo. Lillis doesn't say where his comes from.)

Even worse, Lillis takes some of these correlations and makes causal statements about them, asserting that married couples are "healthier" because they have a sense of responsibility to each other or because "getting married reduces depressive symptoms." The fact is we have no way to measure whether marriage causes any of these minor health differences or, if it does, how or why. If studies of singles and marrieds do show significant differences in, say, risk taking, perhaps that's because single people tend to be younger, and youth is associated with risky behavior. If singles do have slightly higher resting blood pressure than marrieds, maybe that's not because they're alone in their beds but because they worry more about things like health care or social security, which are more accessible to married couples.

No matter what, we can't talk about what marriage causes or doesn't cause because marriage is not a variable you can manipulate like an electric shock to get an experimental result (though some would say divorce gave them quite a jolt). See, marital status is similar to traits like age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation in that the researcher can't change them. In order for a researcher to claim that something causes an effect, he or she has to be able to add or remove it at will to demonstrate that it was solely responsible for the outcome of the experiment.

To use a nonsense example, if a researcher wants to prove that everlasting gobstoppers turn kids blue, then she has to take two groups of kids that have never eaten everlasting gobstoppers and make sure that one group eats them and the other doesn't. In addition, she has to make sure that there are no other dietary, environmental, genetic, or medical differences between the two groups that might explain why some kids look like they fell in a blueberry bush. If, after determining that there are no differences between the groups except that one is getting gobstoppers, the researcher finds that the kids who eat gobstoppers turn blue, then she can tentatively state that gobstoppers may cause kids to turn blue. Why tentatively? Because, as careful as she was, maybe there was some other difference between the groups that she missed. That's why studies are repeated over and over again for confirmation and why most scientists are very, very careful when they talk about causation.

However, let's say the researcher is faced with two groups of kids, one that's already blue and one that's not. She wonders why some kids are blue, and she asks all the kids a bunch of questions and notices that the blue kids all used to eat gobstoppers. Well, that's interesting, and the researcher can say that she found a relationship or correlation between gobstoppers and blue kids, but she can't know with any certainty that the gobstoppers caused the kids to turn blue. Maybe the kids who turned blue were also eating snozberries, and maybe it was actually the snozberries that did the damage. Or maybe the kids who turned blue were suffering from a rare, unknown sugar deficiency that affects skin tone, so they craved lots of sweet gobstoppers.

Saying that marriage causes anything is like saying that kids who are already blue definitely got that way because they ate gobstoppers. We just don't know. And even if we could randomly assign some people to be married and some to be single and observe the results, it would still be hard to make causal attributions because, just like the researcher in the first example, we might've overlooked something.

For some reason, though, when marriage is the subject, researchers and clinicians fall all over themselves with eagerness to make causal statements. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's because marriage is popular and relatively easy to enter into, so it encourages people to hear that something they perceive as desirable and ubiquitous is good for their health. It's also possible that the reasons are more sinister and revolve around a research agenda that favors the status quo for economic or political reasons. Whatever it is, medical professionals like Lillis are highly irresponsible when they jump on the bandwagon and repeat these fallacies to patients and readers who don't know any better.

Towards the end of the article, Lillis plays devil's advocate for a minute, but even his counterargument, which posits that healthier, "more genetically appealing" people are more likely to get married, is insultingly singlist. No, Dr. Lillis, the problem is not that we singles are all Quasimodos compared to you strapping, married bombshells. It's that we singles are less likely to have health care. It's that we can't take time off work to heal from illness or injury because we have no second income. It's that we have more financial woes in general because we earn less and pay more than you marrieds do, and that's stressful. It's that we face a lot of social discrimination (the kind of discrimination you're guilty of right now), and that's stressful, too.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure Lillis can understand this logic because in the most presumptuous statement of his presumptuous article, he demonstrates an appalling lack of it. Check out this statement in all its singlist glory:

There is no real way to prove this [that marriage does not cause better health]; it is just a bitter, jealous theory of a loveless set of scientists who spend too much time in the lab to find true love.

Oh, dear, dear, dear. Doesn't Dr. Lillis realize that the burden of proof is on him? The scientific method always assumes no cause-effect relationship until one is proven. To return to our blueberry bunch, the researcher must assume that gobstoppers don't turn kids blue unless she can prove conclusively that they do. In direct contradiction to universally accepted research practice (and logic), Lillis says the exact opposite--that gobstoppers must turn kids blue unless we can prove that they don't. Good news for quack researchers everywhere! Now you can assume Santa Claus, the Loch Ness Monster, and spontaneous human combustion exist until someone proves that they don't!

Lillis's lapse in logic might be forgiveable if it wasn't laced with all that singlist rhetoric. I'll tell ya what, Dr. Lillis, let's invert your statement so that it's both logically valid (instead of fallacious) and anti-marriage (instead of singlist) and see what we get:

There is no real way to prove that marriage causes better health; it is just an ignorant, narrow-minded theory of a codependent set of scientists who spend too much time at home to get out and see what the real world is like.

Here's another good one:

There is no real way to prove that marriage causes better health; it is just a desperate, envious theory of a bored-stiff set of scientists who spend too much time tied to the old ball and chain to have any fun.

Just gotta do one more! Here we go:

There is no real way to prove that marriage causes better health; it is just a sad, pathetic theory of a lonely set of scientists who've wasted too much time in loveless marriages to admit they'd be happier alone.

Now, do any of those statements sound appropriate to make to a married patient? Would you, Dr. Lillis, want someone to make such a statement to you? Then why, I wonder, do you believe it's appropriate to talk that way to your single patients and readers?

Even if Lillis's interpretation is right on the money and marriage is the fountain of youth (which I don't think it is), I'm not sure what would be the point of saying so. A marriage certificate is not a drug that you can dispense when a single person straggles in with the flu, and if it were, it would have a pretty poor track record. If you think of marriage like a drug (thanks, Bella DePaulo, for this analogy), it doesn't work for at least half the people who try it (those who divorce), not to mention the unknown percentage who stay married unhappily. What doctor recommends a drug that's effective for less than half the people who take it?

In conclusion, I want to state for the record that I am single and in good health. I don't smoke, drink heavily, or have other substance abuse problems. I'm not a risk taker. I am not depressed. My blood pressure is so low that it actually causes problems occasionally. Despite what Lillis says about singles who don't take care of themselves, I go to the doctor when I'm concerned that something's wrong.

Interestingly, my dad, who is married, does not. In fact, when I noticed a worrisome skin lesion on his back awhile ago, my mom, his wife, said that she'd been after him to get it looked at for months. You know who convinced him to go to the doctor?

Me. His daughter.


What do you think about Dr. Lillis's article? Do you think married people are really healthier than singles?


Fun Link of the Day


Do you have a question for Clever Elsie about some aspect of the single life? Have a rant or rave about singlehood? Write in, and you just might see your question in a Singletude Q&A or your rant or rave in a Singletude Sound-off!

Singles Are Healthier Than Unhappily Marrieds

Breaking news, singles! This study on the correlation between marital status and blood pressure has been making the rounds of the online news hubs, so if you haven't read it, point your browser there.

We've been force-fed a lot of propaganda about how marriage guarantees a longer, healthier life even as many of us singles have stood on the sidelines of marital feuds and wondered how the heck those couples could sleep at night, let alone outlive us. Well, the scoop is that a marriage certificate doesn't mean squat if the relationship isn't fulfilling. In fact--surprise, surprise--it's better to be single!

The researchers measured blood pressure in 204 married partners and 99 singles and collected measures of marital satisfaction and adjustment from the couples. As expected, higher levels of marital satisfaction and adjustment were associated with lower blood pressure. But the big news is that couples who scored poorly on marital satisfaction and adjustment had blood pressure levels that rose through the roof, surpassing those of happier couples and singles. In fact, the dissatisfied couples had blood pressure readings that hit the danger zone!

The bottom line: It's much better for your health to be single than to be unhappily married.

For singles, this isn't news. It's something we've known all along. Not that we're running around pumping our BP monitors like some people check their BlackBerries, but we've likely seen our coupled friends stressed over everything from infidelity to who's going to cook tonight, and in the meantime, we've been retiring each evening to a comfy couch, a free remote, and a bed that no one has to make in the morning. Since most of us have been in relationships, we can also contrast our currently unruffled emotions with the bumpy ride we took through the final stages with the ex. What a fun house.

You can't argue with the facts about a good marriage. There is a lot of evidence that happy partnerships boost disease-free longevity. Yet, for some reason, whether self-righteousness, denial, envy, bitterness, or fear of those who are different, society has insisted for some time that all marriages have this protective effect, while we singles, floating along without the pressures of spouse and kids, are doomed to ill health. That's counterintuitive, and now we also know it's blatantly false.

For me personally, one of the unsung advantages of singlehood is the even keel of a predictable, stable emotional rhythm. Even in the best relationships, it seems the heart is always somersaulting over the ups and downs of coupled life--the spats, the misunderstandings, the doubt and rejection. When I'm single, I may miss out on the highs of romance, but I certainly don't miss the lows of heartbreak, and while an absence of the former won't kill you, the latter can by depressing your immune system, elevating your blood pressure, and increasing your risk of heart attack.

Instinctively, I think we've always known that it's better to be single and happy than married and miserable. But it's nice to have it validated anyway.


Do you think it's healthier to be alone than to be trapped in a bad marriage? Have you been healthier as a single than you've been in unhappy relationships?


Fun Link of the Day

"Marriage: It's Only Going to Get Worse" by Jeanna Bryner: A Singletude Response

The title of this Singletude post links to a perfect comeback the next time a busybody accosts you at a party and asks why you're not married. Just grin and say: "Because I can irritate myself just fine, thanks." You certainly don't need a spouse to do it for you, but that's what this study from the University of Michigan suggests he or she will do.

Eight hundred participants ranging in age from 20 to over 60 were asked to rate how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statements "my spouse/partner gets on my nerves" and "my spouse/partner makes too many demands on me." As the age of the respondents increased, they were more likely to rate their marital partners as irritating and demanding. However, the researchers found that the opposite was true of how children and friends were perceived; they were seen as less irritating and demanding over time.

The researchers theorized that the results were in part due to the cumulative effect of constant exposure to a spouse's quirks and bad habits. They also implied that married couples feel more comfortable airing their grievances with each other than with friends or children, adding to the miasma of tension. In addition, the study noted that people tend to be more selective about their friends as they age, "weeding out" bad apples, while relationships with children tend to improve as they reach maturity.

The bottom line, though, is that you have some ammo whenever your smug married friends wonder why you haven't joined them in connubial bliss. Just remember that although they may not let on when they invite you over, presenting the united front of his and hers monogrammed towels and heart-shaped picture frames, when the last guest leaves, they're irritating the heck out of each other.

Okay, so we all know there are plenty of positive aspects to marriage that weren't covered in this study. But what the study emphasizes is that romantic relationships aren't the gateway to happiness. The "singletude" philosophy has always been that a strong social network comprised of many different kinds of relationships is greater than the sum of its parts, that no single relationship, including marriage, holds the key to personal fulfillment. The University of Michigan study supports the value of non-romantic relationships and even compares them favorably to marriage.

Singles, take note: you now have scientific evidence to prove that your social life is just as glowing, if not more so, than that of your irritated, put-upon married friends. Read it, learn it, quote it. But just don't be irritating about it. :)

When you've been in relationships in the past, did you perceive your partner as becoming more irritating or demanding as time went on? How about your friends and kids if you have them? Have they seemed more irritating or demanding over time?


Fun Link of the Day