Drink too much? Maybe you should get married, says new University of Missouri study

For those who struggle to work up the nerve to approach the people they want to have sex with, alcohol is the mightiest tool in the toolbox. Alcohol is less useful, at least on this front, to married people. Drinking is fun, sure — but there’s less incentive to stay out till 3 a.m. pounding Irish whiskey and ruin the entire next day when you can’t participate in the modern, drunken sexual mating rituals enjoyed by single people. 

Though this is instinctively true, a new study has come along and confirmed it. The study goes a step further and suggests that marriage can cause dramatic drinking reductions even among people with severe drinking problems.

Building on research done at Arizona State University, researchers at the University of Missouri recently examined the drinking rates of people as they aged from 18 to 40, and how those rates were affected by whether or not those people became married. 

“Confirming our prediction, we found that marriage not only led to reductions in heavy drinking in general, this effect was much stronger for those who were severe problem drinkers before getting married,” says Dr. Matthew Lee, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences in the College of Arts and Science at Mizzou. “We believe that greater problem drinking likely conflicts more with the demands of roles like marriage; thus, more severe problem drinkers are likely required to more substantially alter their drinking habits to adapt to the marital role.”

In other words: When people get married, they tend to have more responsibilities. Responsibilities are harder to deal with when you’re hung over. As a result, most people decide to drink less. 

The study did not examine what happens when marriages turn to shit and drinking becomes a coping mechanism to deal with the horror show your life has become.