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Married men behave better

Men tend to behave better when they're married - both because marriage likely helps improve their behaviour, and nicer men are more likely to be married in the first place, a new study reports.

The researchers found that men with fewer nasty qualities were more likely to eventually end up married. But among men who did marry, some showed signs indicating that their bad behaviour decreased after the union.

These findings address a long-standing debate among researchers, concerning why married men display fewer qualities associated with antisocial personality disorder, such as criminal behaviour, lying, aggression, and lack of remorse. Is it because marriage reforms them, or because men with more of these nasty traits are less likely to get married in the first place?

The answer

A little bit of both, study author Dr S. Alexandra Burt at Michigan State University told. Married men "are just not as antisocial to begin with," she said. "And when they get married, they get even less antisocial. So both things are going on."

Burt and her colleagues adopted a novel approach to investigate the link between marriage and antisocial personality disorder, said Dr Ryan King at the University at Albany, SUNY, who was not involved in the study.

Specifically, they followed 289 pairs of male twins for 12 years, from age 17 to age 29. More than half of the twins were identical.

The findings

The authors found that men who eventually married during the study period - about 60% of them - showed less antisocial behaviour at ages 17 and 20, suggesting that men with more of these traits are less likely to get married in the first place. By the age of 29, unmarried men had an average of 1.3 antisocial behaviours, compared with 0.8 among married men.

However, among identical twins in which one was married and one wasn't, the married twin had fewer antisocial behaviours after the union than the unmarried twin.

Given that identical twins, with their similar genetics and childhood environments, are likely to have the same antisocial tendencies, these findings indicate that marriage helped weed out those bad behaviors.

"Not everyone is equally likely to enter the institution of marriage," King said. "But those that do enter into it get some benefit from it."

Men’s behaviour improve after marriage

It's not clear why men's behaviours might improve after marriage, he noted. Married men may spend more time with their spouses than their friends, King said, and bad behaviours such as delinquency and binge drinking tend to be group activities.

In addition, married men "have more to lose" if they're caught doing illegal activities, and may care what their spouses think.

The results, presented in the Archives of General Psychiatry, help explain the consistent findings from other studies that men who are married commit fewer crimes. One recent study, for example, showed marriage was associated with a 35% reduction in crime.

Historically, studies have also found that married people as a group tend to be healthier than singles - though recent research suggests the health advantage of marriage may be fading.

Still, people with spouses tend to live longer, be less depressed, and suffer less from heart disease and stroke.(Reuters Health/ November 2010)

Read more:
Happy Marriage Cuts Men's Risk for Stroke
Marriage good for mind and body
The lighter side of sex and marriage

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