If your romantic relationship is on the rocks — drinking together could prolong the partnership, and might even make you live longer, according to a study.
The study, published in the journal the Gerontologist, found that couples who drink together and who have similar drinking habits are more likely to live longer and have a healthier relationship.
Kira Birditt, the lead author of the study and a professor and researcher at the University of Michigan, said that couples who have similar drinking patterns — what alcohol literature refers to as a “drinking partnership” — have less marital conflict and longer relationships. However, she said researchers aren’t sure why drinking with a spouse is “associated with better survival.”
“The purpose of this study was to look at alcohol use in couples in the [university’s] Health and Retirement Study and the implications for mortality,” she said in a U-M press release.
The recent study looked at 4,566 married, different-sex couples who were all over the age of 50. Birditt interviewed the couples every two years.
The survey didn’t ask people what type of alcohol they were drinking or how much, but rather if they drank with their partner sometime in the past three months.
“And we found, interestingly, that couples in which both indicated drinking alcohol in the last three months lived longer than the other couples that either both indicated not drinking or had discordant drinking patterns in which one drank and the other did not,” Birditt said.
The researcher warned people that her study findings shouldn’t be read as a recommendation to drink more: Sometimes what is helpful for relationships isn’t necessarily good for health. However, it’s important to note that couples impact each other’s physical well-being — she said more research is needed to determine how.
“We don’t know why both partners drinking is associated with better survival. I think using the other techniques that we use in our studies in terms of the daily experiences and ecological momentary assessment questionnaires could really get at that to understand, for example, focusing on concordant drinking couples,” she said. “What are their daily lives like? Are they drinking together? What are they doing when they are drinking?”
“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,” she added.
Birditt’s new study was a closer look into research she conducted in 2016, for which she surveyed 3,000 couples married for 33 years. The study found couples who drank together were happier than couples where only one partner drank.