Husbands & Wives: Who Drinks More, Who Drinks Less?

Do married men or married women drink more?

A new study finds that where drinking is concerned, marriage seems to be more beneficial to men than women: it reveals that compared to their single or divorced counterparts, married men tend to consume fewer alcoholic drinks, whereas married women tend to consume more.

Men are more likely than women to hit the bottle after a divorce, according to the survey into marriage and alcohol conducted by sociologists at four universities. The study was based on surveys of 5,000 men and women conducted over 47 years.

Lead researcher Corinne Reczek, professor of sociology at the University of Cincinnati, said, “Stable marriage curbs men’s drinking yet is associated with a slightly higher level of alcohol use among women. Our findings suggest that being married to a man who is more likely to drink creates a new social environment that may promote drinking among women.”

Reczek added, “Some research suggests that men are more likely to cope with stressors in “externalizing” ways such as drinking more alcohol, possibly contributing to alcohol abuse or the disease of alcoholism. Women are more likely to cope in “internalizing” ways such as depression rather than alcohol abuse.

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The study also looked into how drinking habits are affected when marriages end. The researchers found that while divorce causes men to drink more, women actually tend to…

…go back to drinking less. Possible explanations for this, according to the researchers, could be that a husband’s heavy drinking may put couples at a higher risk of divorce. Another possibility is that, for men at least, the stress of the divorce may have prompted increased drinking.

Meanwhile, in the study participant interviews, an overwhelming majority of women said that either divorce depressed and turned them away from alcohol, or they drank less because they were no longer around their husband’s drinking.

Despite this, women that were long-term divorced and recently divorced reported significantly more drinking-related problems than long-term married women. And while the research thus far is not sufficient to draw a direct cause-and-effect relationship between drinking-related problems and rates of divorce, it may help physicians better recognize risk factors for problem drinking that lurk within our social lives.