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New study finds that alcoholism increases marital instability

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Look at this new study from CNN.

Excerpt:

Alcohol dependency not only affects people who drink excessively, but also spouses, friends and family. Now a new study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research finds that alcoholism has a strong connection to when people get married and whether those marriages are successful.

“For young adults who are drinking, if their drinking continues to levels of problem use, it could impact their likelihood of marriage as well as likelihood of having a really lasting marriage,” said study author Mary Waldron, assistant professor in human development at Indiana University. “What we found is yes, it’s true that alcohol dependence is a strong predictor of separation and we’ve known that for quite a while, it was really the predictor of delayed marriage that was surprising to us.”The study looked at 5,000 Australian twins, ages 28-92, all of whom reported a history of alcohol dependence sometime over their lifetime.

The researchers found the association between alcoholism and getting married for the first time at a 23% lower likelihood for women. For men it was 36% lower only after age 29. For both sexes, the researchers concluded that the chance of separation was twice as likely and earlier. They also found that genetics played a role.

“What we found by using both fraternal and identical twins is that genetic influences appear to contribute to the association … but the processes underlying the genetic effect, we really don’t know yet and that will be a focus of future research,” Waldron said.

The reason I am worried about this is that there seems to be so much drinking that goes on on university campuses. It’s like the young people are really getting addicted to it, and there seems to be a lot of peer pressure on everyone to drink and drink and drink. I think alcohol is very interesting (I was recently visiting friends and got to try whiskey for the first time – it was horrible!) and it makes people feel at ease when you are having a good serious conversation. But I am not so sure about drinking it all the time. It’s expensive, and it alters your moods. How can you be good at making sense when you drink too much? So I think in moderation it’s OK, but not too much.

I think that reading articles like this are important to me. It’s good to know WHY the Bible says things are right and wrong. If being drunk is “wrong” then why is it wrong? Why does God not want us to do this? With a little study and some good research, we can find the answers. And then when we talk to non-Christians about right and wrong, we can explain the reasons for the moral positions we hold using scientific evidence. It’s a lot easier to talk about morality in public when you have solid evidence that doesn’t assume the Bible.

7 thoughts on “New study finds that alcoholism increases marital instability”

    1. I have to use these studies to convince people who don’t listen to common sense. Also, it makes right and wrong less a matter of opinion. If you are arguing with an alcoholic, it helps to have a way of quantifying the strain that they are putting on you so that they can’t blame-shift against you and say that something you do is as bad. I’ve had people do that to me when I make moral judgments.

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        1. Because college students don’t care about “the future”. It’s all about living it up for the here and now. Trust me, I’m still in college. The people in my intro to religion class (as liberal as it is) don’t even care one way or another! It’s not even atheism vs theism so much as it is the importance of the issues at hand versus apatheism.

          My sister smokes up a storm and she knows the consequences full well. In fact, she can articulate all the problems of smoking to me as if she were teaching a class. Yet, she doesn’t even make the attempt to quit. Heck, she can even calculate the cost of how much cigarettes she buys and how it could offset paying off her student loan.

          Such a problem is shared among those who, in some way, consider themselves “rebels”.

          Rebels are smart and are aware of the situation, but the fact is, they don’t care. They don’t want people pointing it out to them, as if they didn’t know already, and certainly they don’t want to hear it from us uptight, rigid, no-fun, no-life, right-wing conservatives who they feel have a holier-than-thou attitude.

          For such people, it’s not the information content or the authority of the person giving the content, but rather the gravity of the consequences that seem lost to them.

          This reminds me of a humorous, yet scathing quote someone told me in a discussion one time, “I’m not advocating capital punishment, but can’t we just take the safety labels off McDonald’s coffee and let the problem solve itself?”

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  2. That’s exactly what I said, Mara! Rather I wrote, “we hardly need a well-funded decree from the secular clergy to know that this is true” Somebody got their PhD proving, as you say, the obvious!

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