Why Marriage is Bliss for Women

By Tom Kelly

A HAPPY marriage cuts stress for women but makes no difference to husbands, a study claims.

Working women enjoying wedded bliss have lower levels of a stress hormone than those in miserable relationships, psychologists found.

Mens stress levels, however, depend mainly on how busy they are at work, not the state of their home life.

Researchers suggested this is because happy couples share chores and childcare more equally, making it easier for busy wives to unwind.

Darby Saxbe, the psychologist who led the study at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: As far as women are concerned, being happily married appears to bolster physiological recovery from work.

Women in unhappy marriages are coming home from a busy day and, instead of having some time to relax and have a spouse picking up the load of setting the table, getting dinner going, signing forms for the kids, these women may have to immediately launch back into another stressful routine. Perhaps in happily married couples the demands of domestic life are being shared more equitably between men and women.

In the study, published in the journal Health Psychology, researchers asked 60 married parents how satisfied they were with their marriage and how busy they were at work. The UCLA team also collected saliva samples to measure stress hormone levels.

Women in happy marriages were shown to have stronger declines of the hormone than those in less blissful unions.

In men, their relationship with their wife seemed to have little effect on levels of the hormone, which were affected far more by how busy they felt at work.

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