7 Tiny Signs Your Marriage Is Wreaking Havoc On Your Health

An unhappy marriage can lead to an unhealthy life.

By Michael W. Regier, PhD
Last updated on Jan 29, 2024

Photo: Keenan Constance | Pexels, Africa images, shisuka | Canva

Womans mental health struggling from unhappy marriage

Humans are wired to be deeply affected by the moods and behaviors of the person we are married to. When those moods and behaviors tell you that you are not liked or loved, your physical health (as well as your mental health) will be affected, regardless of how liberated or self-sufficient you think you are.

Here are 7 tiny signs your marriage is wreaking havoc on your health:

1. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

PTSD is often related to life-threatening events, like being in a war or auto accident. Scientists now know how psychologically devastating it is to be betrayed by the person you trust with every fiber of your being. When this happens, your body goes into a hyper-alert state to protect you. Anxiety and feeling out of control will make you feel like you're going crazy. And that will be incredibly debilitating. You will live in a constant state of fear of being betrayed again. Things that remind you of the betrayal can trigger a paralyzing fear response.

2. Increased anxiety and depression

Attachment researchers like Alan Schore have discovered that our brains are wired to rely on the person we bond with to help us regulate our emotions. When you feel afraid, sad, or anxious, you need the person you love to understand what you are going through. You will have problems with anxiety and depression if your emotional reaches are met with a blank stare, dismissal, or even anger.

It is common for people who are in unhappy marriages to shut down and become more depressed or to become very anxious. Both of these mental problems are ways that your brain will try to cope with the fear of not being emotionally connected with the person you love. Anxiety is a high-alert state that will cause you to ask for validation from your partner. You might be in a constant state of worry and find it difficult to relax, sleep, or focus.

If you are anxious, you need your partner to validate their love and not dismiss it when you feel overwhelmed. The last thing you need when you are anxious is to be told that you are emotionally exaggerating. This will only make you more anxious. You want to be told by your partner that he understands and feels sad about how much you are struggling with your anxiety. You also want to be reminded that you are loved and safe in your relationship.

Getting sad and depressed might be your way of coping with an unhappy marriage. This will cause you to turn inward and try to shut the world out. You will be perpetually sad and lose interest in doing fun things. When depression gets worse, you will have problems with sleep, concentration, weight gain or loss, and a lack of energy. If your depression gets bad enough, you may have thoughts of wanting to die. This seems extreme, but is how an unhappy marriage affects you or your loved ones.

Emotionally Focused Couples therapy is helpful to stop the cycle of marital conflict and to help the person who is depressed. Having a safe, understanding partner is very healing for a person struggling with depression. Unhappy relationships have little emotional attunement. This leaves one or both partners feeling that they need to manage their anxious or depressed emotions on their own. The lack of emotional attunement also causes problems with identity and personality disorders.

3. Identity problems and personality disorders

From the time you were born, a healthy identity was shaped by the caring validation of those you love. You learned to know yourself by the way you were validated when you were sad, ashamed, or afraid. When a parent tunes into your emotions and lets you feel understood, you learn the relationship between how you feel and how your emotions are triggered.

Over time, you learn how to ask for what you need rather than cry when hungry. You knew your hunger would be responded to by a loving parent. You learned to know yourself and interact with care to others who could meet your needs.

Children who are not emotionally validated often learn to be ashamed of having needs and the emotions triggered by them. They don't trust themselves and fear letting others care for them. They often struggle with shame, which has to do with not being good enough. This creates problems with identity. A healthy identity requires knowing your needs and feeling okay about letting others know you are struggling and need help.

Healthy kids with secure identities have parents who are emotionally present after a bad soccer game or dance recital. Their parents encourage them to face their fears. They tell them it's okay when they are hurt, fail, or are mistreated. This is the foundation for a healthy identity.

Any problems with the identity that formed during childhood are taken into marriage. Bringing identity struggles into a marriage will challenge the stability of your marriage. If your marriage becomes unhealthy, it will make your identity problems worse.

If your partner doesn't love and validate you, it will be nearly impossible to feel confident and secure. This will be especially true if you were neglected or abused as a child. Child developmental trauma causes a whole range of personality disorders. Narcissism and borderline personality disorders are two of the most crippling examples.

Researchers know humans develop internal working models of self that are based on how they are loved and cared for as children and adults, which is discussed in Emotional Connection: The Story and Science of Preventing Conflict and Creating Lifetime Love. Your view of yourself is formed by how you were and are related to your most intimate relationships.

4. Poor cardiac health

Studies have shown marriage is related to fewer cardiovascular disease risk factors and increased longevity. A long-term study of 2,000 people found that the odds of dying from a cardiovascular event were significantly higher for people who were divorced or never married. Other studies have shown that unhealthy marriages harm cardiovascular health. Relationships that are not healthy cannot prevent the progression of heart disease the way that healthy relationships do.

If you are in a satisfying marriage, you are 3.2 times more likely to live after coronary artery surgery. Relationship conflict and negative thoughts and feelings about the relationship over 10 years have been linked to higher mortality, even when controlling for age and blood pressure.

5. Profound loneliness

Most unhappy marriages cause profound loneliness. Louise Hawkley found that loneliness raises blood pressure and doubles the risk of both heart attack and stroke. James House found that emotional isolation is a more dangerous health risk than cigarette smoking or high blood pressure. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, asked men with a history of angina and high blood pressure, "Does your wife show her love?" Those who answered "no" had twice the number of angina episodes over the next five years.

Women who have unhealthy marriages have significantly elevated blood pressure, and women who have heart attacks are three times more likely to have another one if they are in an unhealthy marriage. The list goes on about how an unhappy marriage affects you and your physical health.

6. Weak immune system

Your immune system will struggle to stay healthy if your marriage is unhealthy. Rejection by a partner, hostile fights, and low marital satisfaction have been linked to increased inflammation problems, particularly in women. In a fascinating study, researchers found the more belligerent and contemptuous partners were, the higher their stress hormones and the lower their immune systems. The more hostile the fighting was, the longer it took for blisters (that the researchers created with a vacuum pump) to heal.

Your immune system works best in a safe, loving, and supportive relationship. Your body knows what you need to survive and thrive. When you live in daily conflict, stress hormones will negatively affect your immune system and make you more likely to get sick.

7. Increased emotional and physical pain

It's vital to understand how an unhappy marriage affects you and your emotional pain. Most people don't understand that people struggle more with pain when they are emotionally disconnected from the person they love. Do you expect your soul mate to be there for you when you're in pain? Most people do. You probably would not think twice about taking off work if your partner was in the hospital or was injured at home. You may have thought that this is just the right thing to do and have not considered that being connected and present lowers pain perception.

Couples who come in for therapy are often in more distress than people who show up in emergency rooms. Many therapists don't feel competent to work with couples in conflict. It's because they don't know how to help regulate their acute emotional pain. The threats of losing your first love, the place you live, and complete access to the children you love are terrifying. When this threat of loss is taken away, emotional pain will significantly decrease, and so will your perception of physical pain.

In a fascinating study, Dr. Sue Johnson studied a couple in conflict before and after couples therapy. Using fMRI imaging, Johnson found that the pain center of the brains of women in conflict was red hot during a threat. After Emotionally Focused Therapy and feeling connected to her husband, the brain barely lit up when threatened by the fMRI. The same was true regarding her perception of pain. In the first condition, she reported feeling a lot of pain. With the second condition, she said she felt little pain.

Interestingly In both conditions, her partner comforted her by holding her hand. When the couple was in conflict and disconnected from her husband, the hand-holding did not reduce her pain. When the couple was connected by holding hands, it resulted in a reduction of pain perception and pain center activation.

The truth is we are wired to need emotional connection, which is why an unhealthy marriage or relationship can be so damaging to physical and mental health. If you are single, you may spread this need out among a few trusted family members or friends. But, if you pair up, you will psychologically and biologically need that person to love you.

Behavioral scientists discovered the importance of pair bonding in the 1950s. John Bowlby was employed by the World Health Organization to investigate why so many infants who lost their parents during the World War were dying, even though they were given food and clothing. The answer was that kids were not being held and lovingly interacted with. The term "failure to thrive" was developed to describe the biological wasting away of infants who were not emotionally cared for by a maternal figure.