Sociology graduate student Adrianne Frech said she had expected to find that happy people benefit more from marriage than depressed people because they were more likely to have a happy marriage.
She and her team speculated that because depressed people have difficulty communicating and are more co-dependent -- needing much more care and support than happy people -- they stood to gain less from a relationship.
Frech told LiveScience, "We were surprised. We expected the depressed to have worse marital quality and therefore benefit less from a transition into marriage."
Frech and her research team studied 3,066 men and women who had been interviewed in the late 1980s Five years later they were interviewed again. One of the interview questions were if they got married and the health of that marriage. Then their happiness was gauged.
Those who married scored an average of 3.42 points lower on the 84-point depression scale than those who did not marry.
When researchers further analyzed those results they found that those who were depressed at the beginning of the study and married within the five years scored an average of 7.56 points lower on the depression scale than the depressed who did not marry. Those who were happy at the start of the study scored only 1.87 points lower on the scale.
The team found that depressed people still gained more from marriage even if the marriage was not happy. In fact, the study still realized that depressed people generally have less happy marriages.
Frech said, "The depressed benefit more from a transition into marriage despite their having, on average, worse marital quality."
The findings will be published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
