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I also thought a lot about the article about marriage and health this week.  The results of these studies strike me as fascinating, but I'm also a little wary of what they're actually telling us.  All of these studies are correlational, and, in my opinion, could all very well be related to a third variable that's being ignored in collecting data.  Perhaps married people are healthier than single people.  But maybe that's simply because healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.  We talked about the evolutionary idea of choosing a mate based on attractiveness, which can be correlated with health, in order to insure that your offspring are as healthy as possible.  So if everyone's only choosing relatively healthy mates to begin with, marriage becomes an institution with a somewhat limited population.