Key Messages
Married individuals live longer than the non-married, and in Norway and some other countries, this mortality gap has become larger over recent decades.
Among the never-married in Norway, mortality did not fall over the last decades of the 20th century, and in 2005-08, mortality was as high for them as it was for the married three decades earlier.
It is widely known that better educated persons tend to live longer than the less educated. There is apparently less public and political awareness of the fact that marital status is also strongly associated with mortality. Yet, hundreds of studies carried out over more than 150 years have shown that those who are married have better health and live longer than those who are never-married, divorced or widowed. In combination with the large proportion of non-married in European countries, and the likely future increase, such a gap in health and mortality between married and non-married persons may be seen as a major public health challenge. The situation will be particularly worrying if the mortality disadvantage of the non-married increases, as it has done over recent decades in several countries.