No abstract

This article examines the prevalence of partnership formation at different life stages and analyses whether the determinants of partnership formation change over the life course. Data were obtained from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the years 1992 to 2014. Event history analyses were used to examine 13,871 periods of being single, of which 8,551 ended with the beginning of an intimate relationship. The results show that the formation of intimate relationships becomes increasingly unlikely after the fourth decade of life onward, particularly for women. At the same time, several predictors of partnership formation vary substantially with age. Economic resources accelerate partnership formation particularly in midlife, whereas good health accelerates partnership formation only in later years. These results remain similar when the transition into cohabitation is examined.

This study focuses on two main questions. First, do non-cohabiting relationships have an effect on mental and physical health? And second, do non-cohabiting relationships affect health in a similar way as cohabitation and marriage? To differentiate between the selection effects of healthier individuals into a couple relationship and the causal effects of couple relationships on health, we test hypotheses about the accumulation of health effects over time. We apply fixed-effects estimation techniques to data from the German Socio-economic Panel. For women, mental health improves after establishing a non-cohabiting relationship and remains similar after starting cohabitation and after getting married. For men, only marriage improves mental health status. The impacts of couple relationships on physical health primarily depend on the duration of the relationship and slowly accumulate over time. In addition, effects are stronger for younger adults.

Studies that analyse the association between relationship status and health usually disregard non-marital relationships. The present study examines if the use of different relationship indicators leads to different associations between relationship status and physical and mental health. The database used for this analysis is the Survey of Health and Ageing in Europe, a large population-based survey of Europeans aged 50 and over and their cohabitants. This study combines cross-sectional and retrospective data of 13 European countries. The sample size is 9298 men and 11,631 women for grip strength and 9609 men and 12,333 women for depression. Generalised estimating equations are used. For men, the goodness-of-fit measure quasi-likelihood under the independence model criterion indicates that marital status is a better predictor than cohabitation status or partnership status for predicting grip strength. However, for grip strength of women, there are only small differences in the model fit between the different relationship indicators. For both men and women, the partnership status (marriage, cohabitation or dating relationship) shows the best model fit for explaining depression. The results suggest that future health research could benefit from the use of relationship indicators other than marital status, particularly regarding mental health.

No abstract