Marriage in men's lives

by Steven L. Nock

Husbands and wives share a marriage, but not the same experiences of marriage. Men and women live in worlds that are organized around gender, and their marriages reflect differing realities. Numerous findings have reported that married men are better off than married women on measures of both physical and mental health, but the reasons are not yet fully understood. In Marriage in Men's Lives, Dr. Nock proposes an explanation for this. He focuses on marriage as a system of rules, customs, and expectations. The book shows that marriage changes men on basic dimensions of achievement, participation in public social life, and philanthropy because marriage reinforces such behaviors as part of adult masculinity. Men in modern society crave well-being, comfort, luxury, and prestige, and marriage affords a means of achieving these things within circumscribed legitimate boundaries. Using a huge data base of over 6,000 interviews with men studied yearly since 1979, Dr. Nock draws some interesting