It never hurts to be on the same page as your partner — and according to a recent study, that applies to drinking habits, too.
Published in scientific journal The Gerontologist, the study found that couples that drink and have the same drinking habits tend to live longer versus those in which only partner imbibes and those in which neither partner drinks. University of Michigan research professor Dr. Kira S. Birditt was inspired to examine this connection by a theory in alcohol literature known as “the drinking partnership,” which asserts that couples who have similar drinking patterns tend to have healthier marriages. The research also expands upon a study Birditt conducted in 2017 in which she explored whether couples that drink together stay together.
“The purpose of this study was to look at alcohol use in couples in the Health and Retirement Study and the implications for mortality,” she says, according to Science Daily. The Health and Retirement study is a nationally representative study of adults age 50 and older in the U.S. which consists of 4,656 married, different-sex couples who are interviewed every two years.
The study wasn’t specific when it came to measuring the quantity that its subjects drank, but instead polled participants on whether or not they had consumed a drink in the past three months. The study found that couples in which both people indicated drinking alcohol in the last three months lived longer than the other couples with partners that both indicated not drinking or had discordant drinking patterns in which one drank and the other did not.
“We don’t know why both partners drinking is associated with better survival,” Birditt says. “Behaviors that are good for marriage are not necessarily good for health. There is also little information about the daily interpersonal processes that account for these links. Future research should assess the implications of couple drinking patterns for daily marital quality, and daily physical health outcomes.”