Uncork it: Keeping your disagreemnts bottled up is bad for your marriage, and your health.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—New research presented at the annual American Psychological Association meeting earlier this month shows that for women, communication in marriage is a matter of life and death. The study shows that women who keep their feelings about their marital conflict to themselves are four times more likely to die from all causes, compared to women who don’t engage in "self-silencing."

THE DETAILS: Researchers used info from the Framingham Offspring Study, in which data was collected on 3,682 men and women, whose health was then tracked for 10 years. The study included this question: “When you have a conflict with your spouse, do you: 1) always show it; 2) usually show it; or 3) usually or always keep it to yourself. For this study, option 3—usually or always keeping feelings of conflict to oneself—was defined as “self-silencing.” After adjusting for risk factors (including existing depression), the researchers found that the self-silencing women—or, women who tended to silence their thoughts and feelings to maintain “safe” intimate relationships—had four times the risk of dying during the 10 years in which they were tracked than the women who didn’t “usually or always keep [feelings of conflict] to themselves.”

WHAT IT MEANS: Talk isn’t cheap—it’s actually quite dear, especially for women in intimate relationships. Interestingly, this finding was independent of whether the women in the study were satisfied with their marriages or happy in general, notes lead study author Elaine Eaker, ScD, president of Eaker Epidemiology Enterprises in Gaithersburg, MD. In other words, open communication in marriage is important even for a woman who says she’s satisfied with her relationship. Because if she consistently bottles up her feelings concerning conflicts with her spouse, she may—for reasons Eaker has yet to determine—be inadvertently taking years off her life.