Married men and women can grip objects more firmly than their unmarried counterparts. Among married men, it is those who have had more than one wife who have the strongest grip of all — and we don’t really know why.
People who are married typically have better physical and psychological health than people who are single. This may be because a marriage partner can provide strong social support or encourage healthier living. Married couples also tend to have larger household incomes, which may be a part of it as .
But we know less about how marriage influences physical ability, particularly in the later years of life. To investigate, Natasha Wood at University College London and her colleagues examined data collected as part of the and the . Both surveys gather data on people in their 50s or older.
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Gripping findings
Wood and her colleagues looked at data on grip strength – as measured using a – that was collected as part of both surveys.
After adjusting for factors including age and ethnicity, the researchers found that unmarried men and women have a significantly weaker grip than men and women in their first marriage. In most cases the differences effectively vanished when the researchers factored in wealth status, suggesting it’s the extra income that marriage typically brings that might explain the results.
But Wood and her colleagues found one result that couldn’t be explained by money. “Remarried men had a stronger grip strength independent of wealth,” says Wood. It isn’t clear why that’s the case, but the team raise one idea that might be worth exploring.
“There is some evidence that those who are healthier are selected into a first marriage,” says Wood. Men who are muscular and stronger seem to be  so it is possible that this effect is magnified among the men who have been “selected” for marriage more than once. In other words, men who have remarried are particularly likely to come from the subset of the male population that is particularly strong.
The researchers also looked at the effect of marriage on the pace that people walk. Men and women who are unmarried typically walk slightly more slowly than married people, but this effect largely vanished when the researchers considered participants’ wealth status.
