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Marriages Affect on Mental Health

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Submitted By Nurik88
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The main ideas according to this article, which was written by Jeremy E. Uecker, is basically the causal relationship between marriage of young adults and mental health. In other words, how marriage influence on mental health. Actually, some recent researches have been indicated that the marriage itself bears a mental health benefits, indeed the age at first marriage, life cycle and transition to adulthood are all the identical variables, which may describe the influence on mental health. Hence, this article was organized to test the main hypotheses, how the marriage confer mental health in accordance with different life course. The reason for studying this particular phenomena and interestingness of this issue is probably that this current issue has been rising and becoming popular in our modern days. Millions of examples of early marriages, high rate of divorce and abandoned children, amount of uneducated people, are all consequentially have an impact on mental health with what lot of young adults face with. In this study, the author is willing to answer the for several questions which might explain the causal relationship between marriage and mental health of young adult, beside this he classified young adults into different categories to analyze what sort of mental health outcomes would arise out of different group of adults. The questions, which are assigned to this study, are: a. What is the effect of marriage on mental health and other relationship circumstances? b. What kinds of effect does it carry? c. Is there differences among mental effects as result of first marriage age? d. What does explain the effect?
In regards with the effect of the marriage on psychological and physical level, it is quite obviously that it positively affects. Thus, as different sociologists and psychologists have observed that married couples are better off in terms of happiness, longevity, physiologically and physically in comparison with unmarried couples (Wilson & Oswald, 2015). In the main article, Ross (1995) argued that “salutary mental health benefits of marriage are the result of underlying social attachment and support” (p. 68). The evident for that I suppose that support from the partner is very crucial when it comes to some problems. Problem solving or stress stability is more efficient when partners are struggling with any troubles together. However, with unmarried or divorced couples the situation may end up with high rates of mental disorder. In this sense, I would prefer to agree with author in terms of studying the effect by classifying adults into different categories. It refers to the fact that socioeconomic differences, personal character of each partner, background, relationship stability and all other factors might affect differently on mental health. However, I assume that it is not always the case, when marriage affects positively on entire health. For instance, we can notice that some couples right after the marriage fare better or in some cases they do not. If couples are not mature enough or not stable financially it definitely will not be resulted positively in terms of mental health rather couples would be under the stress or feeling deprived. Besides, merely speaking of our tradition of bride kidnapping, which is also considered as a deviant behavior nowadays, points out the relationship circumstances when partners are not well acquainted with each other or they are subjected to get married because parents have already decided to do so. One more argument about personal character of partners, me personally quite a plenty of time was witnessed that before marriage couples are more tolerant, relationship is incredible between each other, but the reality comes up right after the marriage. Unknown or not visible characteristics will appear which as result leads to quarrel, disagreement and even to divorce. Thus, it would be distinct if researchers will take into consideration all these mentioned factors and the consequences of it in their further studying rather than simply generalizing it.
The point where I would like to show my disagreement with author and many scholars, which have claimed that marriage at early age, does not confer the same mental health benefits and marital quality, as late marriage does. I would like to justify that statement by the following example, when for instance young man leads carelessly life, parents are trying to get him married so that he can improve and become more mature and tolerant towards everything. As a result, that strategy works in most of the cases, because since the man is engaged in family life he starts to realize that he is in charge of his own family and he has to provide them, it pushes him to change which shows extra beneficial effect from being married at early ages. Being mentally healthy does not necessarily mean to look good by appearance or possessing better wealth, instead being mentally healthy means overall well-being of the person. Being more precise, in order to measure the effect of marital status on mental health it is better to focus on mental health problems. According to George (2007), the exemplary approach to study this phenomenon is to examine the internalizing problems, which is measured by Center of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and externalizing problems, which might be classified as an alcohol abuse. As the author of this article states, that most of the times women tend to internalize a mental health problems meaning that they are more emotional. On the other hand, men tend to externalize, which might be easily noticed, alone man drinking in the bar. Consequently, it asserts the conclusion that psychological well-being should carry positive and negative consequences in order to be more precise on the effect of marriage. Following the methods, which were used to measure the effect, the author’s method was more or less relevant in my opinion in choosing the dependent and independent variables. However, in terms of sample it is not enough for making sufficient results. As it is shown in the article amount of the participants as a sample were selected approximately 24 thousands, indeed the selected sample was only from USA. Obviously, we cannot provide the results considering only the small portion, no matter what sorts of results are obtained from the study. Respectively, a simple example, which has been mentioned in the article that single individuals are supposed to have 2 or more sex partner in comparison with married ones. Thus, it says that it is referred to higher psychological distress of single individuals. Logically, any individuals who has some sex partners is more likely to show lower level of the stress. Furthermore, it is well known fact that sex is one of the efficient way of stress release, which has been approved, by many scholars and doctors. Despite the amount of the sample, we may also consider other factors such as culture, geographical location and gender, which could vary between each other. We can also include one more result as an example, which is identical to the first one where the results indicated that rate of alcohol usage of single and unengaged individuals is more higher than married individuals. This fact might be partially true, however again we should concern that it is not always the case, because of the variables, which have been mentioned above. This might be a very crucial issue in our society because in our society tradition of getting married at early age still exists. Being acquainted with the all consequences and effects of the marriage probably young adults would make an appropriate decision before getting married. Additionally, further studying of that issue may concern the effects of marriage on mental health in different geographical locations, various culture, so that to make a comparison to see whether there are some interesting differences between culture, country etc. Personally, for me this topic was quite interesting to study, because time goes by and the same stage of my life is coming soon. Suggestions of the my relatives, suggestions of my married and divorced friends as well as being personally witnessed by bunch real facts and secondary data, I suppose that it will influence my decision as well.

Reference

Chris M. Wilson and Andrew J. Oswald. 2015. “How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health? A Survey of the Longitudinal Evidence”.
George, Linda K. 2007. "Life Course Perspectives on Social Factors and Mental Illness." Pp. 191-218 in Mental Health, Social Mirror, edited by W. R. Avison, J. D. McLeod, and B. A. Pescosolido. New York:Springer
Ross, Catherine E. 1995. "Reconceptualizing Marital Status as a Continuum of Social Attachment." Journal of Marriage and the Family 57(1): 129—40.
Uecker, Jeremy E. and Charles E. Stokes. 2008. "Early Marriage in the United States." Journal of Marriage and Family 70(4): 83 5—46.

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