Want to Live Longer and Healthier? Your Spouse Can Help Big Time, According to Science

‘If you’re not married, you should be paying extra attention to cancer risk factors.’

EXPERT OPINION BY BILL MURPHY JR., FOUNDER OF UNDERSTANDABLY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC. @BILLMURPHYJR

Illustration: Getty Images

I’ve been vibe-coding for a while and one of my not-ready-for-prime-time creations is an app I’d joked about building forever.

It’s called, Honey, Have You Seen…?

Open it, type in something you’ve misplaced — your keys, your wallet, your reading glasses that were on your head — and the app responds the way a helpful spouse would when you ask them if they might have seen it:

Could it be in the car?

Did you check the counter?

Is it in the pocket of the jeans you wore yesterday?

We laugh at the premise (I hope) because anyone who’s been married for more than a few years knows that at least one partner becomes a part-time external memory and reminder system for the other.

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

As it turns out, that dynamic may be doing a lot more than helping you locate your sunglasses.

Less likely to get cancer

Writing in the journal Cancer Research Communications, researchers at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami analyzed one of the largest datasets ever assembled for this kind of question: more than 4 million cancer cases across 12 states, drawn from a population of more than 100 million people, collected between 2015 and 2022.

Their core question: Are married people less likely to get cancer? The answers were striking:

© Inc.com