Married men were twice as likely to reach old age in excellent physical and mental health as their never-married peers, according to a University of Toronto study tracking 7,641 adults aged 60 and older through the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. The finding, published in the journal International Social Work, followed people who were already in excellent health at the study’s start and tracked who stayed that way roughly three years later. For men, marriage was one of the strongest predictors of what researchers called “optimal aging.” For women, the pattern flipped almost entirely, and never-married women fared just as well as married ones.
What “Optimal Aging” Actually Measured
The researchers weren’t simply asking whether people felt happy. Optimal aging in this study meant a specific combination: freedom from major disease, strong physical function, high cognitive functioning, good mental health, social engagement, and a positive outlook on life, all measured at once rather than self-reported in isolation. Clearing that bar at 60 or older is genuinely difficult, which is what makes marital status such a striking predictor. Men who were married, or who got married during the study period, cleared it at roughly twice the rate of men who had never married. That is not a marginal statistical nudge. It’s one of the larger effects researchers see in aging research of this kind.
Why Marriage Seems to Help Men More
The research team, led by doctoral graduate Mabel Ho and senior author Esme Fuller-Thomson, points to behavior rather than biology as the likely mechanism. According to the study’s official release, co-author David Burnes, a Canada Research Chair, explained that “it may be that married people encourage each other to adopt or maintain positive health behaviors such as quitting smoking or exercising regularly.” Men, on average, are less likely than women to independently maintain routines around diet, medical checkups, and social connection. A spouse often becomes the person quietly managing the appointment calendar, cooking the vegetables, and nudging a partner off the couch. Losing access to that structure, or never having it, appears to cost men more than it costs women, who tend to build and sustain those habits on their own regardless of relationship status.
Why Women’s Results Looked Completely Different
The most surprising part of the study wasn’t what happened to married men. It was what happened to women. Never-married women were about twice as likely to age optimally compared with women who became widowed or divorced, while married women showed no meaningful advantage over never-married women at all. In other words, marriage itself wasn’t the protective factor for women; avoiding the disruption of widowhood or divorce was. Women appear to enter and maintain healthy routines largely independent of a spouse, and often already carry the social ties and caregiving networks that men are more likely to lose access to once they’re on their own.
That gendered split complicates the tidy narrative that marriage is simply good for health. It’s more accurate to say marriage functions as a kind of health infrastructure that men are more dependent on and women are less reliant on building for themselves. A single man in his 60s isn’t doomed, but the data suggests he is working with less scaffolding than a single woman the same age, and less than a married man of either gender.
What This Means If You’re Single and Male
None of this is an argument to get married for your health, and the researchers themselves caution that the findings are correlational, not causal. But it is a useful nudge for men who assume that skipping marriage keeps them “young and free” with no tradeoffs attached. The habits a spouse tends to reinforce, regular movement, a decent diet, staying socially connected, are not exclusive to marriage. They can be built deliberately without a ring. The data simply suggests that men are far less likely to build them without some outside structure pushing them along, and that the men who do marry are, on average, getting exactly that structure for free.
For men who are single and plan to stay that way, the practical response isn’t to panic about the odds. It’s to recreate deliberately what marriage tends to provide by default: a friend who checks in regularly, a standing commitment to move the body several times a week, and a routine that isn’t dependent on remembering to care for yourself in a given moment. The study’s core message isn’t that unmarried men are destined for decline. It’s that the men who age best, married or not, are the ones who found some reliable source of accountability for the habits that quietly determine health decades later.
