As if you needed a reason to be nice to your partner anyway, you can now shower each other with compliments and compromises knowing that it’s good for your arteries.

Marital relationships have all sorts of effects on us, but up until now it wasn’t really known that they were affecting our arteries in the way that they seem to be. When evaluated, partners who reported having more negative encounters with their other half, compared to positive ones, tended to have arteries that were more clogged up.

In other words, couples who argued and moaned at each other tended to have bad arteries, and ones who were civil, agreeable and came to more compromises had much nicer arteries. This is hugely important since clogged up arteries present a huge heart attack and stroke risk and are the one thing we want to avoid.

The interesting part is that the arteries weren’t in bad shape because of behaviours like binging on bad food or drinking alcohol after a negative encounter with the mrs. This means that having bad relationships could be creating an emotional stress which turns in to a physiological stress which directly impacts the arteries, making them more likely to become clogged.

I hope that no marriages were harmed in the making of this blog post, but if you were looking for an escape route then i may have found you one. “It’s not you, it’s my arteries”.

Faye Prior (Researcher)

Source

Joseph et al., (2014). Daily marital interaction quality and carotid artery intima-medial thickness in healthy middle-aged adults. Psychosomatic Medicine, 76(5):347-54.