Effects of Bad Relationships on Our Health

Medical experts frequently remind us that good relationships are essential for our health. A good marriage, particularly, helps us live longer, happier and healthier. However, many studies point to the disturbing effects of bad marriage and bad relationships in general on our health. Recent researches go even further explaining that bad relationships do not only deteriorate our health, but also can have lethal consequences. Namely, the study from 2006 published in the American Journal of Cardiology reveals that people whose health are greatly affected by serious heart disease have approximately four years to live if they live in bad marriages. Medical experts agree that bad relationships, increase the risks for coronary heart disease, causing almost three times greater chance of heart attack in married people. They also agree that marital stress has huge consequences on our overall health. It causes anxiety, depression, sleep problems, weight gain, high blood pressure, diabetes, high triglycerides and an increase of bad cholesterol. The excerpt from the article “High Blood Pressure? Blame Your Partner! Chronic Stress of a Bad Relationship Can Negatively Affect Your Health, Experts Warn” gives us more information on how bad relationships affect our health.

The team at the University of Michigan looked at how stress from a bad relationship could affect married couples over time.
Lead author, Kira Birditt, said: ‘We were particularly excited about these findings because they show that the effects of stress and negative relationship quality are truly dyadic in nature.

‘An individuals’ physiology is closely linked with not only his or her own experiences but the experiences and perceptions of their spouses.
‘We were particularly fascinated that husbands were more sensitive to wives’ stress than the reverse especially given all of the work indicating that wives are more affected by the marital tie.

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The findings support previous research that asserts stress and relationship quality have both direct and moderating effects on the cardiovascular system.
The new study also indicates that it is important to consider the couple as a whole rather than the individual when examining marriage and health.

As we have seen, bad relationships usually express their negative effects on our health, sooner or later. On the other hand, there are several studies that explore how men and women differ while going through important relationship transitions such as marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce, and remarriage. Even though they found similarity when it comes to good or bad marriage, they found out that men feel better when going through several transitions – marriage, divorce, remarriage or cohabitation. On the other hand, women do not cope well with changes in their marital status and feel better when their first relationship is enduring. For men, a lot of them are happier when going through transition phases than men who are in an enduring relationship. No matter what are the differences between men and women regarding relationships, the one thing is sure – the majority of both sexes benefit from a good, loving and stable relationship.