A Comfortable Weight

Long-term couples—heterosexual and gay—fall into unhealthy ruts.

We’ve all seen the wedding photos of yesteryear—they could be your own or those of your best pals—in which the bride and groom are slim and fit, striking a sharp contrast to their current heftier builds. Why do so many couples seem to pudge up together? Is it a given that once you find happiness with a mate, you really do grow fat and happy together?

In fact, intimate, long-term relationships may lead to unhealthy habits, says research from the University of Cincinnati. All couples—heterosexual, gay, lesbian—are vulnerable to falling into bad health habits, what lead researcher Corinne Reczek calls a “bad influence” effect.

Reczek and two team researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 122 people involved in long-term straight or married relationships (31 couples), gay partnerships (15 couples) and lesbian relationships (15 couples), who had been together between eight and 52 years.

Study participants were asked questions about lifestyle habits including smoking, drinking, food consumption, exercise, sleeping, and more. Heterosexual couples often pointed to the male as the bad influence, while homosexual relationships saw a more simultaneous effect between partners.

"Gay and lesbian couples nearly exclusively described how the habits of both partners were simultaneously promoted due to unhealthy habit synchronicity. For these individuals, one partner may not engage in what they consider an unhealthy habit on their own, but when their desire for such a habit is matched by their partners, they partake in unhealthy habits," Reczek writes.

Among heterosexual couples, often one partner observes the other engaging in an unhealthy habit, but does nothing to change that behavior. Reczek says this passiveness contributes to a kind of “complicity” it encourages continuation of the behavior.

Relationship expert Ramani Durvasula, PhD, says the study, with which she was not involved, confirmed a well-known dynamic that she observes quite often in her practice as a psychologist.

“Relationships make you complacent and unhealthy,” she says. “Obviously that is an overstatement, but keep in mind that relationships are places of compromise and often of outsourcing of responsibility—‘it's not my fault, it's his.’”

In addition to practicing compromise and blame shifting, couples also get stuck in a rut.

“They are often in places of homeostasis—trying to maintain the status quo—and the fear of change is what keeps many relationships together,” Durvasula adds.

While couples should want to grow together, often people choose to “stay the same” together, she says, and there is little push for change.

“Any change can muddle the balance of the relationship,” Durvasula explains.

Troubled relationships may suffer further when one partner loses weight, the doctor notes.

Can couples get healthy and fit together just as easily as they can do the opposite?

Durvasula says yes, that there is evidence to support the notion that being in a couple protects one’s health. For example, a partner may remind the other to see a doctor, take vitamins, and engage in other health-promoting behaviors. But this dynamic doesn’t apply to most couples.

“That is more useful in older couples or relationships in which adherence to a health regimen—for example, [to manage] diabetes—is critical,” she explains. “But most people are healthy, and maintaining health is actually a lot harder than it looks—as our rates of obesity attest to. It is here that the complacence engendered by a lot of committed partnerships—straight or gay—can be an unhealthy thing.”