According to a new study, older married couples tend to be happier when they drink together.
The study, published in the Journals of Gerontology, looked at data from over a decade, from a sample of 4,864 married participants in 2,767 couples. They were over the age of 50, with an average marriage of 33 years.
Overall, the study found that both partners in a couple that drank on the same occasions were happier than partners in a couple where one partner drank and the other didn't.
What's interesting is that it mattered less how much a person drank than whether they drank at all. So if you can't keep pace with your spouse, but you still want to enjoy the rest of your lives together, don't worry too much. One drink might be enough to make it work.
All drinking habits are not created equal, though. Results showed that single-spouse drinking was a bigger problem for women than for men. Husbands were more likely to drink than wives. But in cases where wives drank and husbands didn't, wives reported than they were more dissatisfied with their marriage, according to Reuters Health.
