Want to stay healthy? Stop bickering with hubby!
  
Arguing is an inevitable part of married life. But now researchers are studying the marital spat to see if the way you fight with your spouse can affect your health. Recent studies show that how often couples fight or what they fight about usually doesn't matter. Instead, it's the nuanced interactions between men and women, and how they react to and resolve conflict, that appear to make a meaningful difference in the health of the marriage and the health of the couple. A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts, asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically suppress their feelings during a marital spat. In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn't have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn't speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy or an unhappy marriage didn't change her risk. 


NYT