Most Popular White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
Drinking, drug use among newlyweds
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 2006
While it is the husband among newlyweds who has more influence on whether the couple engages in heavy drinking, it is the wife who appears to be in the driver's seat when it comes to determining her partner's marijuana use, according to researchers at the University at Buffalo (N.Y.).
Study results showed that, in the first year of marriage for 20-somethings, husbands are more likely to start or resume smoking marijuana if their wives also smoke. In addition, men are more likely to stop smoking marijuana if their spouses do not smoke. The reverse is not true in either case; husbands do not seem to influence their wives' marijuana smoking.
"Substance use tends to decline as individuals progress through their 20s," notes Kenneth E. Leonard, research professor in the Department of Psychiatry. "This may be a part of the maturing process, but it also reflects periods of transition in life, such as marriage with its increased responsibilities.
"In this study, we found that the prevalence of marijuana use decreased for both men and women over the first year of marriage. For men, use decreased from about 25% to 21% from the year before marriage through the first year of marriage and, for women over the same period, from 20% to 14%."
In addition, they found it was common that individuals who smoked marijuana were married to other marijuana users. "We identified one direction of influence--that is, wives influenced their husbands' initiation of marijuana use, but husbands did not influence wives' use," Leonard indicates.
One potential explanation for this is that marriage alters the relationship dynamic in couples, providing more influence to women after wedlock than before. Leonard says this raises the possibility that, following marriage, wives press for changes in their husbands' behavior, and husbands, in the interest of maintaining harmony and avoiding conflict, may change in response to their wives' expectations.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
