Wives Help Husbands to Seek Care

It's common for a wife to begin pushing her husband to visit the dentist or physician long before her husband thinks he needs to go. To be sure, plenty of wives are also guilty of neglecting their health. But surveys show that men are far less likely to have a personal physician than women. And even when prenatal visits are excluded, women are still twice as likely to seek medical or dental care as men.

Because men put off going to the physician or dentist, they typically are diagnosed with problems at a later stage when they are more serious and difficult to treat.

And that has major implications for a woman's long-term well-being. Seven out of 10 female baby boomers will outlive their husbands and can expect to be widows for 15 to 20 years. More than half of the elderly widows living in poverty today weren't poor before the death of their husbands, according to the U.S. Administration on Aging.

Three out of four women outlive their spouses. The average age of widowhood is 56, and only 7 out of 100 of these widows will remarry. By age 65, more than half of all married American women are widowed.

Wives are in a unique position to persuade their husbands to seek medical and dental care.

There's an old Jimmy Buffett song where he tells his girlfriend, 'You treat your body like a temple. I treat my body like a tent,"

The wives' attention to their spouses health probably accounts for why married men live longer than bachelors.

To quote a gentleman who discovered he had diabetes after going to the doctor at his wife’s request: “It gets back to the value of marriage. If I had been a single guy without someone deeply invested in my life, I'm not sure what would have happened. For lack of a better word, I was nagged into doing something about my diabetes."
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