Men who die early are less likely get married

This is actually a topic that has received a lot of investigation. It's true that men who marry differ, before marriage, from men who don't. But it also seems to be true that marriage has a strong causal effect on male behavior.

Something something correlation causation

There are a lot of instances where long married men lose their wives then die very soon afterwards. When there's a correlation of something with longevity and removing the something is soon followed by death, then there's good reason to believe the causation theory.

True for both partners -- usually after one dies the elderly widow/widower tend to have ~5 years or less.

Some of that is just timing, like if the average age of death per the actuary tables is like 79, and your spouse dies at 80, you're statistically going fairly soon as well.

As far as I recall, there were studies showing some causal effect in the behavioral difference of how early things like cancer were diagnosed.

In essence, the average man living with a female partner would get a "nuisance" investigated, diagnosed with cancer, and (sometimes) treated; while the average single man sought treatment only when the condition was truly disturbing, and by that time it's too late to treat the cancer.

Not really, it just feels longer.

(old joke)

Wut. Since I've gotten married I've:

* quit a job with nothing else lined up to try and start a company

* moved cross country without a place to live

* started boxing

* learned improv and performed in shows

* fostered a bunch of kids

* learned to race rally cars

In fact, the only thing I've done _less_ of is played video games.

Hahaha me too! Since getting married and because of the kind of mental support I got, I quadrupeled my income, travelled the world, got two kids, got boat licensed (together with wife), got ham radio licensed, got a degree, taking flying lessons now (together with wife), start Krav Maga soon (together with wife), start riding motorcycles (together, of course), train playing the piano again, lost 15 kilos (despite the cooking we do), learned a new language (fluent now). And it is really attributable to this strong relationship. Because I get an A/B-test once a year, when my wife visits her home country for some weeks: I get the lazy guy I was before, not achieving much, despite having lots of time. What marriage brings to me is the very long-term view. As far as I can see, I know with whom I will be together and we make plans. I meam, how can you raise even kids without being quite sure that you stick together? Marriage is the very official promise that you try your really best. It is not needed if you feel uncomfortable with it. But for me, very personally, I feel it really helps.

how'd you learn the language? My wife and I are interested after a trip and competing a bit on the language. Immersion? or classes or what?

Well, it was Persian, the language of my wife. I learned it from books and by talking to her and the family. It is my fourth language. But we are also learning spanish now (courses in form of books), but it is too early to really mention it now.

Whoah, hold on. This is very relevant to my interests. I'm in Chicago and the next big thing I want to do is learn Farsi (my wife is taking Japanese classes, which is not very relevant to my interests, so I can't really do it with her). Is there a particular set of books you'd recommend?

I'm actually hoping to find some place to take classes.

Your plan is awesome! The language is pure logic and terseness (all those who want „gender neutral“ language, here you are, there is no article at all, you really have to ask „is this person male or female“).

I am a German native and there are some good books for Germans that I studied with.

Yet, there are some excellent English resources! First, in order to learn to write (and much more if you want to), there is the excellent site www.easypersian.com. which offers 180+ lessons for free I learned to write there (took me two days). Then, there is „Complete Persian“ as a good textbook in English. I remember my first private language teacher I hired used this and it was really good.

I guess being married to someone who speaks the language counts as immersion :)

Are you sure it's because of your marriage and not because you suddenly got a lot of free time?

I'm not sure how much of it is _because_ of my marriage, but I definitely don't have a ton of free time. Those have been pretty well spread over the whole adventure and we were actually on WIC/foodstamps when we had our first kid.

I'll bet you don't get hammered drunk every night either.

Getting hammered drunk gets in the way of actual risky behavior. I mean... you can't fly a plane if you're drunk.