Unmarried Men's Mortality Risk Was 46% Higher Than Married Men's, a 2020 Meta-Analysis Found
A 2020 meta-analysis by Yafeng Wang of Wuhan University and colleagues pooled data on marital status and mortality risk covering 7.9 million individuals and 1.9 million deaths. It found unmarried women had a 22 per cent higher mortality risk than married women — and unmarried men had a 46 per cent higher risk than married men.
Set that against the older picture of the self-sufficient man who shuns romance as a noble figure. Francis Bacon, in “Of Marriage and the Single Life” (1625), wrote that a man with wife and children “hath given hostages to fortune”; Psyche's essay reads him as treating romance and family as impediments to a man becoming his best. Which makes the mortality figures a strange advertisement for the lone-wolf ideal: the state the tradition praised as freedom is the one associated with the shorter life.
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The self-sufficient man has had centuries of good press. Against the essay's premise that love carries disproportionate weight for men, that pose starts to look less like a description of how men thrive than a story they tell about themselves.
Careful with the shape of it, though. The 46 per cent is a comparison of mortality risk between unmarried and married men across millions of records — a difference between groups, not a demonstration that the relationship itself is what keeps anyone alive. It reads better as a puzzle than a prescription.