Why Men Die Before Their Wives?

A funny meme I frequently see in the comments is people rhetorically asking the question, “Why do men die before their wives?” And of course, any man who has been married instinctively knows the answer to that question because they want to. We all think that’s funny and representative, but it might have a little more truth to it than we fully understand.

What most people don’t realize is that men do die, on average, about seven years before their female counterparts. We have all just kind of grown to accept that that’s just the way things are. But there is an interesting fact that most people don’t know, and that is that a hundred years ago, the difference between the male and female lifespan was only about a year. So what’s happened over the last 100 years that has caused men’s lifespans to, uh, not increase as much as women’s or to be significantly shorter than women’s?

People think, “Well, what’s six or seven years, right?” Well, it’s about 10% of your lifespan. To give you an idea of just how statistically significant that is from a scientific perspective, if we cured all cancer—cancer was just purely gone, did not exist in the world anymore—it would only increase the average lifespan by about four years. So it’s almost like men have something worse than cancer all the time. Let’s talk about it.

Back in the 1970s, a new word was added to the English language: psychosomatic. Now, originally the word was created by scientists who were talking about the linkage between a person’s mental state, their psychological state, and their health, their physical state. It has since become turned into some kind of a pop icon or pop meme that people throw out when, uh, someone is complaining about something, someone’s got hypochondria or whatever, and they say, “Oh, you’re you’re just being psychosomatic; it’s all in your head.” That’s kind of the way it’s turned into.

Well, recently, like over the last 50 years, recently, um, there’s been a lot of research into this, and it has created some very interesting outcomes. It’s shown us that there really is a lot more to psychosomatic than just “it’s all in your head.” There is, uh, a lot of truth to what’s going on there.

There’s a book out now by, um, Dr. Gabor Maté, and he’s like a Canadian scientist, and it’s called, uh, *The Myth of Normal*. Fascinating read, if you ever want to really get a full understanding of this stuff, um, I’d definitely recommend it. But, and I’ve read a lot about this myself in other, other, um, contexts, and I’ve seen it firsthand with my clients, but he talks a lot about the influence of, um, stress in our lives and how it impacts our health and how it can have a significant, um, detrimental effect on our overall lifespan. And I think that the qu- answer to the question of why aren’t men living as long as women has a lot to do with, with that issue: the stress that we experience in our lives.

There are tons of doctors that you’ll find on social media who will tell you the reason why your health sucks. They’ll tell you that you’re eating too much meat, or you’re eating not enough meat, or you’re eating too much fat, or not enough fat, or you’re exercising too little, or you’re exercising too much. And any one of those things may or may not be true at any given time for any given person, and there’s a lot of variability that goes into it. The variability that they miss, the thing that doesn’t get caught in the, uh, the algorithms or their, their statistics to figure out why one person can smoke cigarettes until they’re a hundred years old and be fine, and another person, um, will never smoke a cigarette their whole life and die of lung cancer when they’re 60, because we’re all essentially made up with the same stuff, and you would expect that our systems would run essentially the same way. But there is one factor that, um, changes significantly in an extremely meaningful way: your body’s ability to manage anything from the common cold to, you know, brain cancer, and that is your immune system. And your immune system is impacted not just by lifestyle, not just by diet, but also by the amount of chronic stress you have in your life. And that chronic stress can come from, you know, just, you know, your job, your family, your general level of neurosis about the world, but it definitely comes from the relationships that you have in your life. And if you are in a bad marriage, there is no question that you are in a state of chronic stress.

So let’s talk a little bit about what I’m talking about with chronic stress, because it can rear its ugly head in lots of ways. Obviously, if you’re eating really bad food, you know, you’re a junk food junkie, or, you know, eating at fast-food restaurants all the time, you create a level of chronic stress at a physiological level in your body. So you become inflamed; the inflammation levels go up. That inflammation is an immune response to the poison that you’re putting in your body. So you’re literally poisoning yourself with bad food, and your body is literally trying to, um, preserve the tissues and the cells by creating an inflammatory state to defend against the poisons that you’re eating. And that inflammation, if you just had it like, you know, once a year, would be no big deal; it’s like stubbing your toe, and your toe swells up, it’s inflamed, you’re fine. But if you stub your toe every day, um, over and over and over again, well, it’s never going to heal, and it’s going to constantly be in a state of, um, inflammation. Well, that’s what happens when people eat bad food all the time; they’re constantly in a state of inflammation, and that inflammation leads to lots of diseases.

Well, as it turns out, lifestyle is not the only thing that can really wreck your life; um, that inflammation can be caused in a similar way from the thoughts that you have, the beliefs that you have, the, um, experiences that you have. So chronic stress, um, say from a job that you hate—like you just, every day, it’s like, “Ah, I can’t go one more day, not one more day”—and I talked about this in a video maybe a month or so ago about Blue Mondays and why it is that, um, heart attacks occur on Monday mornings at 9:00, especially this time of year, more than any other time. It’s because guys just don’t want to go to work; like they literally just can’t do it one more day, um. Now imagine that rather than your job, it’s, it’s your spouse, it’s your person that you live with. I mean, you’re only at work 40 or 50 hours a week; well, there’s another, there’s 168 hours in a week, so that means the other 120 hours or so you, you’re at home with this, this person that is, um, that hates you, doesn’t like you, is not happy, is constantly, um, dissatisfied with everything in her life, and you’re the cause of it. Imagine that level of stress for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years. That stress gets in you, and it causes inflammation, and it breaks down your immune system. So when your immune system is turned on all the time, it just becomes less, less effective; it doesn’t have the ability to respond to real threats. And that’s why it is, you know, and you know, cold seasons, some people don’t get colds, they don’t get the flu, they don’t get COVID, while other people seem to get one every week. It’s because their immune systems are compromised in some way, and that compromise may just be a result of a job that sucks, bad food, or a bad marriage. Yeah, bad marriages can be really bad for your health.

So there’s lots of guys out there who are going to the gym every day or a few times a week; they’re running, you know, they’re, uh, eating well; they’re doing all the things the doctors say you need to do to, uh, be healthy and extend your life, but they are in a job that they hate or that they’re not feeling any sense of fulfillment from, and they’re in relationships that are dead, that their marriages are over, and they should have been over a long time ago, but they just can’t find a way out. So in this situation, we’ll call our, our patient here, Patient Bob. Patient Bob, um, he’s a good guy, got a family, he’s got a high-paying job, works out all the time, eats healthy, but he’s got high blood pressure, he’s a borderline diabetic, um, he’s in a trapped, he’s a, he’s in a state of chronic stress because he’s stressed. Now say that over. So Bob is in a state of chronic stress because he’s trapped in a job that he hates to support his family, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it. And after years and years and years, as kids finally leave home, he’s still there with this woman who is clearly unhappy and is clearly blaming him for it. So now he’s in a job that is killing him, and he’s in a marriage that is killing him, but he’s afraid to, to change it; he’s afraid to make the move out of it because a, um, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do for a living, and b, he’s afraid that she’s going to take him to the cleaners and take all of his money from him, or half his money anyway. So he’s trapped; he’s, he’s in a prison, if you will. So Bob has nowhere to go; the only place Bob can go is to the grave. That’s the only place where he’s going to find peace in this terrible little scenario. Don’t be like Bob. Bob had other choices that he just chose not to, to acknowledge. None of them are easy, none of them are fun, but they’re all better than the alternative. And I think that most guys don’t realize that alternative. You can leave; you can quit; you can start over. You got to have a plan, but there is a way out, and I think that you guys got to keep that in mind.

Now, there are a lot of guys out there who complain about being lonely; they’re afraid of dying alone. So imagine, just for a minute, that you’re say in your 70s or 80s; you’ve been in a terrible marriage for 40 or so years. This woman clearly does not like you; she hates your guts, but you’re not lonely anymore; you’ve got her there to keep you company, keep you on your toes. But now you are dependent on her to care for you in your final days. You know, you need her; you need to trust her that she’s going to take care of you as you are finishing your time here on the planet. How would that be, really? You’re going to trust this woman who clearly does not like you? She resents you because she’s married to you because you didn’t make her happy; she’s not happy, and she blames her entire wasted life on the one bad decision that she made, and that was marrying you. And there you lay in the next room, dependent on her to keep you alive. H, I don’t think I would want to be in that situation. You know, I would much rather die knowing that if I couldn’t get off the bed that my, my, my pets would eventually eat me, you know what I mean? Rather than knowing that that woman would might just finish me up. Being alone doesn’t mean you’re going to be lonely, and being lonely doesn’t mean you’re alone. You can be lonely in a bad marriage; trust me, that is completely within the realm of possibility, and in fact, I would suggest that most guys in bad marriages are pretty lonely. Um, and having been alone mostly—I mean, I have my dogs, and I guess my daughter lives in the basement, but she doesn’t talk to me that much—um, I never feel lonely; like I never feel lonely. I always have something to do; I always have someone to talk to. I’ve, you know, you can create a life where you are, you know, providing services to people, helping people, whatever, and you can create an environment where you have lots and lots of people in your life. You don’t need to have a wife to, uh, to, um, keep you from feeling lonely.

The stress from loneliness is real, so you have to be aware of it; it’s not something that you can ignore. If you start feeling lonely, you got to take action to address it, just like if you were a smoker and it just came to your attention that smoking was going to shorten your life by five or 10 years and give you cancer or heart disease or whatever, well, you’d probably take some steps to quit smoking. Um, the same thing applies to each of these situations. If you’re in a bad job that is killing you—literally killing you—you hate going that much, then you got to put together a plan to quit that job and move on. Um, if you’re in a marriage that is unhappy and is causing you to feel chronically stressed, then you’ve got to take steps to do something about that. You cannot just allow that to fester for years and years and years; trust me, it will not serve you well at all. You are much better taking the financial hit or whatever it is, and it’s going to be tough, it’s going to be emotionally difficult, it’s going to be a, but you’re much better taking that hit now and getting it out of the way than letting it drag on for another 5, 10, 15 years or whatever it’s going to be. Nobody wants that; nobody wants that. Um, and then if it comes to loneliness, well, that problem is a lot simpler to solve when you compare it to finding a new job or finding a new marriage. You just need to find some people to hang out with. I’m telling you, there’s lots of places you can go; there are clubs, there are, you know, activities you can get involved with, charities; hell, you can just go down to the local bar and watch football games or sports or whatever, join a book club, go to church. I mean, there’s lots and lots and lots of places that you can find and meet people who will be engaging that you will enjoy talking to; you can develop relationships with. It’s just a matter of putting in the effort. I don’t think you’re lonely; I think you’re lazy. That’s what it is; you’re lazy. You don’t want to get off the couch; you want someone to come to your house and entertain you, and that’s not going to happen. You’re going to have to actually put some effort into your life in order to get something out of it. So I don’t like hearing people say, “Oh, I don’t want to die alone; I don’t want to be lonely.” It’s like, “Well, then don’t, don’t be lonely; do something about it; get off your ass; do something about it.” But, uh, yeah, lonely isn’t a good excuse; it’s just a lack of creativity; you just need to do something; don’t be lazy.

Um, but being in a bad marriage, being in a bad job, only leads to chronic stress, and that chronic stress has a, a dramatic and profound impact on your body’s, um, immune system and your, your overall health, and it will affect your longevity; it will reduce the quality of your life significantly, um, and it will shorten your life significantly. So don’t allow that to, um, to happen. You have the power and the control to make a decision that benefits you at this moment. Now, it is going to be hard, but it is better than the alternative. When you start thinking about, “Is it better to be dead, or is it better to be in this state of chronic, um, or is it better to just to leave?” Well, it’s much better to leave than be dead. I mean, yeah, wouldn’t you rather spend the last decade or two of your life in a state of relative peace and harmony with yourself and your surroundings and your family and everybody else rather than being in a, a toxic relationship that is clearly causing you a lot of pain and distress and, and stress and, and, and just making you sick? So yeah, it’s a choice, and you can make it, so take, take advantage of it.

I think what happens is people condemn themselves for making bad choices, and rather than accept that the choice was bad, we double down on it and try to fix it. We try to prove to ourselves that we were right the first time, and, um, eventually you’ll come to the conclusion that you were better off making a different decision. So it’s better just to take your lumps and move on and just accept that you made a mistake. We all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes are big; you take the wrong job, you marry the wrong girl, whatever; just, just move on; just, um, don’t make it worse than it has to be. It’ll be better for your health in the now, and it’ll be better for your health in the future. Um, you may add years to your life by making a good decision now. If you were a chronic smoker or drinker, you would take steps to preserve your life, so, um, do it. You know, think about a bad job, a bad marriage, bad relationships, all like eating, you know, at Kentucky Fried Chicken every single day and smoking cigarettes in the parking lot and then washing it all down with a fifth of Jack Daniels. Yeah, that’s not gonna, that’s not going to end well for you; you know that. That’s what being in a bad marriage and a bad job is like. So take control of it and, uh, and extend your life. You know, all right, you guys, that’s all I got for you today. I certainly hope this video has been enjoyable, educational. If it has, please leave me some comments; I love hearing from you guys, and, um, remember—oh, first of all, like and subscribe—and then remember, stay healthy, and if you can, stay single.