A Healthy Marriage? Emerging Marital Status Differences in Mortality in Scania, 1815 – 2015

Marriage is protective of survival and contributes to healthy ageing, whereas both singlehood and widowhood are related to increased mortality and poor health. The long-term change in the mortality differentials by marital status, and its interaction with gender and social class, has not been systematically addressed in the literature. In this study, we explore the marriage premium for survival and widowhood, bereavement and divorce penalties for survival over time using an established database for Southern Sweden (SEDD) between 1905 and 2015. We show that married men have and had a survival premium, while especially widowers have increased mortality, most strongly directly after bereavement but also in the longer run. It is remarkable that there is such stability in the survival advantage of married men, despite massive social, economic and demographic changes. Mortality differentials by marital status are smaller for women and absent for much of the twentieth century. Over time, it appears that there has been convergence in the patterns of mortality by marital status between men and women. The divergence in mortality by marital status for women started in the blue-collar class. White-collar and blue-collar men were similarly affected by marital status. Overall, we conclude that marital status is important for longevity, and has been so for the entire twentieth century for men, and increasingly also for women.