Marriage May Cause Alzheimers? A Review of Perhaps the Worst Research Presentation I’ve Ever Seen
Sunday, April 13, 2025.
This just in: marriage might give you dementia!
Also, coffee causes heart disease (until it doesn’t), and walking your dog may reduce your risk of premature death—assuming the dog is not too stressful.
The latest viral headline comes from a study out of Florida State University, which claims that unmarried people—especially the divorced and never-married—may have a lower risk of developing dementia than their married peers.
The story quickly became catnip for algorithmic news cycles and commitment-wary Redditors.
The cultural damage from this bullsh*t is well underway.
After all, nothing sells online like the slow erosion of one of civilization’s most resilient social structures.
But what the study actually shows is far more complicated—and, paradoxically, far more validating of why marriage still matters, even if its benefits are intentionally misrepresented.
So before we crown divorce a neuroprotective therapy, let’s intelligently discuss what marriage is, what the data actually says, and why human beings might still need lifelong, witnessed love more than ever in an era defined by optimized solitude and filtered loneliness.
The Study: What It Really Found (and What It Really Didn’t)
The Florida State study tracked over 24,000 Americans over 18 years.
Initially, it seemed that divorced and never-married participants had a slightly lower risk of dementia than those who were married.
But that’s after adjusting for confounders like depression, smoking, and socioeconomic status. Even then, the effect was modest and specific: the difference showed up more for Alzheimer’s disease than vascular dementia.
The researchers themselves admit several things:
Ascertainment bias may be at play. Married people often get diagnosed earlier because their spouse notices subtle cognitive shifts.
The sample skewed white, married, and middle-to-upper class. Translation: their “findings” are completely ungeneralizable.
No data was collected on marital quality, which—as any clinician knows—is the one speciific variable that matters most!
So this wasn’t a study about marriage. It was a study about marital status.
And these researchers amateurly bungled an administrative category for an emotional ecology.
To say “marriage causes dementia” is like saying that living in a house causes back pain—without asking if the house had stairs, mold, or love in it.
What Marriage Really Does (When It’s Working)
Let’s set aside the data for a moment and ask a human question:
What is marriage actually for?
It’s not just a romantic arrangement. It’s not just a tax shelter. Marriage is one of the few relational institutions we have left that:
Encourages long-term co-regulation of emotion.
Fosters shared identity through narrative and memory.
Builds predictable rituals, which ground attention and calm the nervous system.
Offers early detection for illness—mental, physical, or existential.
Creates a relational structure for aging, when friendships thin and identity loses the scaffolding of work.
In other words: marriage isn’t about protection from dementia. It’s about protection from entropy.
It’s a long-haul mutual surveillance agreement—emotional, ethical, spiritual.
One person watching the other slowly become someone else, and staying anyway.
That doesn’t show up in the data tables.
But it shows up in the kitchen at 6:30 a.m. when someone forgets what day it is and someone else puts the coffee in their hand.
Why the Cultural Narrative Is Turning on Marriage
There’s a reason this story went viral today.
We are living through a moment of cultural anti-commitment chic.
Marriage is now seen by many as a relic of patriarchal history, a lifestyle inconvenience, or worse—a psychological liability.
In its place, we valorize:
Autonomy.
Flexibility.
Individual growth.
Optimization over obligation.
The problem is: we’re trying to meet collective psychological needs with tools built for solo living.
And when we fail—when loneliness creeps in, when burnout sets in, when our identity begins to fray under the pressure of unrelenting self-curation—we blame ourselves.
Or, increasingly, we blame institutions like marriage for not meeting expectations that they were never designed to fulfill alone.
Why People Think Singleness Is “Protective” Now
The Florida State study seems to suggest that unmarried people—especially divorced and never-married—are cognitively safer.
But what if this isn’t about relationship status at all?
What if it’s about how modern culture is starting to reward certain types of emotional insulation?
Because I am so epically pissed off, Let’s me be blunt:
Unmarried people may be less likely to be diagnosed because they have no one around to notice.
They may report fewer symptoms because they have no one to confess them to.
They may experience fewer relational stressors because they have fewer long-term, emotionally entangled relationships.
But none of that equates to long-term well-being.
It may just reflect the privatization of distress—people quietly losing themselves without witnesses.
Marriage, at its best, guarantees that someone else is paying attention.
Isn’t that fu*king obvious?
That may look like increased diagnosis risk. But in practice, it’s the difference between being seen in your decline and vanishing into it.
What the Broader Science Actually Shows
Contrary to this one-off finding, the meta-literature on marriage and cognitive health still Cleary leans decidedly positive:
Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010, 2015) found that strong social relationships—including marital ones—significantly reduce the risk of mortality and cognitive decline.
Conway & Pleydell-Pearce (2000) demonstrated that autobiographical memory is structured by shared narrative recall—which is exactly what long-term relationships cultivate.
Umberson & Montez (2010) concluded that marriage tends to produce better health outcomes for most adults, provided the relationship is not high-conflict.
The outlier isn’t marriage. It’s the culture that’s losing interest in investing in its complexity.
Now researchers like these Floridians, are truly screwing up bigtime with embarrassing rookie mistakes of epic proportion.
I try to be kind, I truly do, but this crew can’t find their research asses with both hands.
The Deeper Question: Who Will Remember You?
In the end, dementia is not just about neurons. It’s about the collapse of narrative—the loss of the story that tells you who you are. And marriage, when it is tended well, is a co-written memoir in real time.
If you lose that story, and no one is there to tell it back to you—gently, patiently, lovingly—what happens?
That’s not just a medical question. It’s a spiritual one.
And it cannot be answered by the statistical noise of one study with too few variables and too many assumptions.
This is perhaps the worst presentation of truly bad research I have ever seen.
The Neurology of Being Known: Why Long-Term Love Preserves the Self
What if memory isn’t just something your brain does on its own, but something it learns to do in relationship? What if the most stable architecture for autobiographical memory isn’t the hippocampus, but the shared stories we tell with the people who stay?
Modern neuroscience increasingly points in that direction.
Our brains are not isolated archives. They are social memory systems.
As Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) proposed, autobiographical memory is co-constructed. When we forget who we are, it is often those closest to us who remind us: "Remember when we..."
This matters profoundly when we talk about marriage and aging. Because the reality is this: as memory begins to slip, it is not data we lose—it is continuity. It is selfhood.
And in long-term marriage, one partner becomes the external hard drive of the other.
Relational Scaffolding for a Failing Mind
Marriage offers what psychologists call distributed cognition.
You remember the birthdays. I remember the passwords.
You keep track of our grandkid's soccer schedule. I know the pharmacy hours.
This mutual outsourcing isn’t just convenience—it’s a neurological survival strategy.
In dementia, this scaffolding becomes critical. The spouse is often the first to notice subtle changes.
The first to fill in gaps. The first to compensate without complaint. And when the official diagnosis finally arrives, the spouse often becomes the caregiver, historian, and co-narrator of a shared life that is slowly vanishing.
Narrative Identity and the Echo Chamber of Marriage
Dan McAdams (2008) has argued that our sense of self is built on narrative coherence—the ability to connect past, present, and future into a meaningful story.
Marriage, at its best, is a story co-authored across time. When one mind weakens, the story doesn’t immediately fall apart. It echoes.
This echo effect is one of the quiet blessings of marriage. It preserves identity by relational proxy. Even when one partner can no longer tell the story, the other can continue it.
It’s not a cure. But it is a profound form of continuity.
Marriage and the Last Great Resistance to Cultural Amnesia
But we live in a culture that has decided to forget on purpose.
It forgets promises. Institutions. Shared history. Sometimes it forgets actual history. Everything is now, now, now—updated, optimized, and ready to be swiped away.
In this cultural atmosphere, marriage is an act of resistance. Not just against loneliness or entropy, but against forgetting itself.
The Slow Memory of Institutions
Institutions are, as sociologist James Davison Hunter once wrote, "the social memory of a people."
Marriage is perhaps the oldest. It doesn’t update quickly. It resists versioning. And because of that, it can carry history in ways other structures cannot.
Marriage can remember:
Who you were when you were 22.
What mattered to you in the first year of parenthood.
The particular slant of light on your face at the moment when you first heard your father has died.
Even as folks forget, marriage holds on. It bears witness.
The Cultural Cost of Memory Loss
In a society that erases and reinvents constantly, the loss of long-term commitment isn’t just a personal risk. It’s civilizational amnesia.
Marriage, when it works, guards against that.
It does what no algorithm can: it sees you in time. Not just in the filtered now, but in the ongoing continuity of becoming.
And in the twilight of our cognitive strength—when memory thins and the world starts to flicker—being seen like that may be the most neurologically protective thing of all.
Not because it prevents dementia. But because it remembers us anyway.
Marriage Still Matters—But We Have to Tell the Right Story About It
The real takeaway isn’t that marriage is bad for your brain.
It’s that we’re asking marriage to compete with an attention economy that rewards withdrawal, optimization, and narrative disconnection.
Marriage is not an app. It does not update in real time. It has no algorithmic rewards. It is slow. It is often frustrating.
But it is also the best shot most souls have for being known across time.
And when memory begins to falter—and it will, eventually for most of us—that kind of knowing may be the only sort that matters.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261
Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Very happy people. Psychological Science, 13(1), 81–84. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00415
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
Liu, H., & Umberson, D. (2008). The times they are a changin’: Marital status and health differentials from 1972 to 2003. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 49(3), 239–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/002214650804900301
McAdams, D. P. (2008). Personal narratives and the life story. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 242–262). The Guilford Press.
Umberson, D., & Montez, J. K. (2010). Social relationships and health: A flashpoint for health policy. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(1_suppl), S54–S66. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146510383501