As with most things in life, men and women tend to do things differently. When it comes to aging, men fare better in certain areas and women tend to do better in others. However, when it comes to marriage, the impact on healthy aging now seems clear: Men seem to do much better if they are married or remarried, while for women, that’s less meaningful. Let’s take a look at the data to explore this.

Published in the International Social Work journal, this new study involved 7000 Canadians who have been part of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Participants were aged 60 and above and followed for 3 years. The goal of the study was to determine how marital status affects men versus women when it comes to aging “successfully,” which can be defined as maintaining physical and mental health, social well-being, and overall life satisfaction, even if you’ve had to deal with illness or disability. If you can stay positive, engage in meaningful activities, and have valuable relationships, together with your health, all are signs of “successful” aging. The results of this research, consistent with earlier research, were nonetheless quite striking. Older men who were continuously married throughout the study or married during the study were twice as likely to be successfully aging in contrast to men who never married. But older women who never married did twice as well as women who became widowed or divorced during the study. Women who were married throughout the study fared comparably to the never-married women when it came to aging well.

Why these different results? It could be that married spouses encourage each other to engage in positive health behaviors. Or, as one report stated, “It’s thought that gaining a spouse helps men, especially, as women take an active role in monitoring their health.” It is also likely that women retain more of a social network and relationships as they age, which as we know is critical for healthy aging. Thus never-married women do not depend on the positive impact of having a spouse to stay healthy. More research needs to be done but for now, we have one more data point to demonstrate aging differences between men and women.

More generally, older men often have a tougher time in their later years. Often struggling to maintain or build friendships, they may have difficulty post-retirement with adjusting to a new life role and navigating modern gender roles, and on average, older men die 6 years earlier than older women.  Along with women, older men of course must engage in a healthy lifestyle and behaviors in order to age well, including eating a healthy diet, exercising, and staying active and engaged. But older men, as this new study reflects, often don’t pay attention to their own health and signs of problems (if there’s no partner to nudge them), and thus they may miss out on some of the routine and preventive care that will catch serious illness and disease while symptoms are silent or minimal. Of particular concern are mental health issues among older men. Data now show that suicide rates among older men surpass every other demographic. Disability, disease, social isolation, and depression may all fuel the suicide uptick in older men, along with access to firearms. Programs have been put in place in some areas to try to address and respond to this growing issue, but it’s on all of us who have older men in our lives to stay involved and engaged, so that the needs of older men, especially those on their own, don’t fall through the cracks.