Getting married helps people stop drinking

It’s commonly acknowledged that marriage changes a person, and new study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research has found that that change can be for the better: Tying the knot tends to decrease how much you drink, especially in heavy drinkers.
Researchers previously found that alcohol-use disorders generally decrease with age, known as “maturing out”. Like the marriage phenomenon, scientists believe it has to do with the roles we take on as we go through life.
“A key conceptual framework psychologists use to explain maturing out and the ‘marriage effect’ is role-incompatibility theory,” said Matthew Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in the psychological sciences department at University of Missouri, in a press release.
“The theory suggests that if a person’s existing behavioral pattern is conflicting with the demands of a new role, such as marriage, one way to resolve the incompatibility is to change behavior. We hypothesized that this incompatibility may be greater for more severe drinkers, so they’ll need to make greater changes to their drinking to meet the role demands of marriage.”
Tie the knot to cork the bottle
In order to test this, the researchers from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University accessed data previously collected from a long-term (and still ongoing) study of familial alcohol disorders. They analyzed the data of 844 participants (around 50% of whom were children of alcoholics) as they aged from 18 to 40, examining how drinking rates changed before and after marriage.
“Confirming our prediction, we found that marriage not only led to reductions in heavy drinking in general, this effect was much stronger for those who were severe problem drinkers before getting married,” said Lee.
“This seems consistent with role incompatibility theory. We believe that greater problem drinking likely conflicts more with the demands of roles like marriage; thus, more severe problem drinkers are likely required to more substantially alter their drinking habits to adapt to the marital role.”
The researchers say that more research needs to be done in order to better understand how role-driven drinking reactions happen, and hope that new findings may improve clinical efforts to help severe problem drinkers, affect public health policy changes, and allow more targeted interventions for problem drinkers to be found.
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