We work from a life course perspective to assess the impact of marital status and marital transitions on subsequent changes in the self-assessed physical health of men and women. Our results suggest three central conclusions regarding the association of marital status and marital transitions with self-assessed health. First, marital status differences in health appear to reflect the strains of marital dissolution more than they reflect any benefits of marriage. Second, the strains of marital dissolution undermine the self-assessed health of men but not women. Finally, life course stage is as important as gender in moderating the effects of marital status and marital transitions on health.Married individuals are, on average, healthier than their unmarried counterparts, and men appear to receive more benefits from marriage than women (Hemstrom 1996;Lillard and Waite 1995;Rogers 1995). Recent research, however, raises serious questions about this general conclusion. An alternative explanation is that marital status differences in health result from the substantial but transient strains of marital dissolution. Despite much speculation about the processes responsible for marital status differences in health, most attempts to answer this question have been constrained by the use of cross-sectional data. We employ nationally representative longitudinal data to examine the impact of transitions into and out of marriage on the self-assessed health status of men and women. Further, we consider whether the effects of marital transitions on men's and women's physical health endure or attenuate with time.We also integrate a life course perspective with research and theory on marriage and health to investigate whether the benefits of being married or the strains of marital dissolution differentially affect the health of young, mid-life, and older men and women. The life course perspective suggests that the timing of role transitions and statuses influences their effects on well-being (Elder 1985; see George 1993). Applying a life course framework to research

We work from a life course perspective and identify several reasons to expect age and gender differences in the link between marital quality and health. We present growth curve evidence from a national longitudinal survey to show that marital strain accelerates the typical decline in self-rated health that occurs over time and that this adverse effect is greater at older ages. These findings fit with recent theoretical work on cumulative adversity in that marital strain seems to have a cumulative effect on health over time-an effect that produces increasing vulnerability to marital strain with age. Contrary to expectations, marital quality seems to affect the health of men and women in similar ways across the life course.

A long tradition of research and theory on gender, marriage, and mental health suggests that marital status is more important to men's psychological well-being than women's while marital quality is more important to women's well-being than men's. These beliefs rest largely on a theoretical and empirical foundation established in the 1970s, but, despite changes in gender and family roles, they have rarely been questioned. The present analysis of three waves of a nationally representative survey indicates that, with few exceptions, the effects of marital status, marital transitions, and marital quality on psychological well-being are similar for men and women. Further, for men and women, occupying an unsatisfying marriage undermines psychological wellbeing to a similar extent-and, in some cases, to a greater extent-than exiting marriage or being continually unmarried. Thirty years ago, sociologist Jessie Bernard argued that the gap in men's and women's marital experiences was so great as to constitute "his" and "her" marriages (Bernard 1972). Bernard further proclaimed that, "marriage introduced such profound discontinuities into the lives of women as to constitute genuine emotional health hazards" (p. 37). A year later, Gove and Tudor (1973) introduced and tested a similar theory, arguing that married women are at greater risk for mental illness than their male counterparts because the adult roles of married women are less valued and more frustrating than those of married men. According to Bernard, the gendered nature of marriage places women in a double-bind: Although family roles are less beneficial and, in some ways, more harmful to women than men, gendered socialization processes encourage women to highly value and identify with the role of wife and mother. Therefore, marital quality should be more important to women's mental health than to men's, while simply being married should be more important to men's mental health than to women's (Gove, Hughes, and Style 1983). The idea that marriage benefits men more than women while marital quality affects women more than men forms the cornerstone of sociological research on gender, marriage, and mental health and continues to drive much of the research conducted in this area today. For the past thirty years, this idea has contributed to research and theory on a range of related topics, including * This research was supported in part by a National Institute on Aging Specialized Training Grant (2T32AG00243,

This study uses a nationally representative sample of individuals involved in dual-earner marriages to examine the relationship between perceived fairness of housework completion, marital happiness, and divorce. The authors expected to find that perceived inequality in the division of housework causes tension between spouses that leads to decreased marital quality for both men and women. They further speculated that an unfair division of household labor might contribute to a greater likelihood of divorce. Results indicate that perceived inequity in the division of household labor is negatively associated with both husbands[#X2019] and wives[#X2019]reported marital happiness but is positively associated with the odds of divorce among wives only. Little evidence indicates that marital happiness mediates this relationship. The authors propose that unfair perceptions of the division of household labor not only decrease women[#X2019]s marital quality but also lead to role strain that makes them more likely to end unsatisfying marriages.

No abstract