By Jim Leffman via SWNS
Couples that enjoy a drink together also live longer, a new study has revealed.
Those who both boozed from time to time lived longer than teetotal pairs or couples where one drank and the other didn’t.
A theory called “the drinking partnership,” where couples who have similar patterns of alcohol use tend to have less conflict and longer marriages was the inspiration behind the study.
A team from the University of Michigan set out to find what effect drinking had on health rather than the success of the marriage.
They were surprised to find that in terms of health, if both couples drank they lived longer.
Kira Birditt, a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research said: ” Behaviours that are good for marriage are not necessarily good for health.
“The purpose of this study was to look at alcohol use in couples in the Health and Retirement Study and the implications for mortality.
“And we found, interestingly, that couples in which both indicated drinking alcohol in the last three months lived longer than the other couples that either both indicated not drinking or had discordant drinking patterns in which one drank and the other did not.”
But the study published in the journal The Gerontologist warned against hitting the bottle.
Due to its broad definition of drinking, they say that the results may be a reflection of compatibility among partners in their lifestyles, intimacy and relationship satisfaction.
Birditt added: “We’ve found in other studies that couples who drink together tend to have better relationship quality, and it might be because it increases intimacy.
“We don’t know why both partners drinking is associated with better survival.
“I think using the other techniques that we use in our studies in terms of the daily experiences and ecological momentary assessment questionnaires could really get at that to understand, for example, focusing on concordant drinking couples.
“What are their daily lives like? Are they drinking together? What are they doing when they are drinking?
“There is also little information about the daily interpersonal processes that account for these links.
“Future research should assess the implications of couple drinking patterns for daily marital quality, and daily physical health outcomes.”
