Love may be a universal need, but working hard to find a mate could shorten your life.
A new study shows that men who reach sexual maturity in an environment where they far outnumber women--and therefore face more competition in finding a mate--live an average of three months less than men who come of age with more women around and don't have to work as hard to find the love of their lives.
The higher the gender ratio of men to women (also known as the operational sex ratio), the shorter the lifespan for those hard-working romantic men, according to the study, which was led by Harvard Medical School and published in the August issue of the journal Demography.
"At first blush, a quarter of a year may not seem like much, but it is comparable to the effects of, say, taking a daily aspirin, or engaging in moderate exercise," says Nicholas Christakis, senior author on the study and professor of medicine and medical sociology at Harvard Medical School as well as professor of sociology at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in a statement. "A 65-year-old man is typically expected to live another 15.4 years. Removing three months from this block of time is significant."
The new study, which compared Census figures, Medicare records and long-term data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, only shows the correlation between an out-of-whack gender balance and shortened lifespans for men; it doesn't explain why the first leads to the second.
Other studies of populations in countries such as China and India--where selective abortion, internal migration and other factors have led to men outnumbering women by 20 percent--have shown that gender imbalances have many harmful effects on society, including increased rates of murder, infanticide, human trafficking and other forms of violence and abuse.
Christakis says that the shortened lifespan for men who have to work harder to find and win the woman of their dreams probably results from a combination of social and biological factors. Finding a mate can be stressful, he says, and stress is a major contributor to many health problems.
"We literally come to embody the social world around us," he says, "and what could be more social than the dynamics of sexual competition?"
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