Longer Living Through Bickering?

I found this quite interesting to read:

Recent studies show that how often couples fight or what they fight about usually doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s the nuanced interactions between men and women, and how they react to and resolve conflict, that appear to make a meaningful difference in the health of the marriage and the health of the couple.

A study of nearly 4,000 men and women from Framingham, Mass., asked whether they typically vented their feelings or kept quiet in arguments with their spouse. Notably, 32 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women said they typically bottled up their feelings during a marital spat.

In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk.

So a woman who holds back from speaking her mind while arguing with her husband seems to be courting death. What's even more interesting is the fact that it didn't seem to matter if the women who held their tongues considered themselves to be in a happy marriage. Which means, at least according to this study, that even a woman in what she herself considers to be a happy marriage is not served well by holding back - even for the sake of peace. What's strange is the fact that men do not seem to have their health affected by similarly bottling up their feelings. Why is that? Is the fact that women suffer more ill effects from the stress of holding back their feelings completely physiological? Are women's constitutions really so much more delicate that they suffer more than men do from bottling up their feelings? Or is it that a vestige of the old patriarchal system - regardless of how far women seem have come on the equality front - has many men feeling superior deep down and thus unthreatened even when holding back their true feelings? Whereas no matter how equal a woman feels in a relationship, when withholding her feelings, she somehow feels abused and taken advantage of? I'm not sure, but I would love to hear some readers' ideas.

One more note: this study doesn't address whether couples would be better off trying not to bicker at all - it seems to concern only those couples already in the throes of bickering. One would have to imagine that there might be some better advice for a couple dealing with problems than to simply tell the woman to give as good as she gets.