It turns out that men who live alone for a long time and have had a lot of breakups are more likely to have health problems than women. Living alone for more than six years and having two or more breakups raise the risk of high inflammation in men, but not women, a study by the University of Copenhagen has found. Inflammation in this case refers to long-term and reoccurring tissue irritation, not illnesses caused by viruses or bacteria.
People who are middle-aged in Denmark have been studied by researchers for more than 20 years.
They looked at files, questionnaires, and blood tests for inflammation in 4,835 middle-aged men and women. Between 2009-2011, when the people in the study were 50-60 years old, their inflammation levels were checked. Breakups can be prevented, which could cut down on some of the health risks, but this doesn’t mean that you should stay with your partner at all costs, says Rikke Lund, because previous research shows that bad relationships can also hurt your health. If you take this approach, both divorce and breakups in non-marital relationships are taken into account.
Non-marital breakups could be overestimated because two friends of different genders who live together and then move away from each other could be counted as well. However, the advantage of this method is that it allows researchers to look at breakups in both married and non-marital relationships.
Rikke Lund says that we should keep making living forms that can help people who live alone feel less isolated. She says that most people who look for co-housing schemes for older people are women. Elderly men and women have very different habits when it comes to looking for social contact.
Women are far more likely to want to be with other people than men. The reason women who live alone have a lot of social contact may be because men who live alone are less likely to look for company.
