also that 'his' marriage is better than 'hers'. Numerous findings have reported that married men are better off than married women on measures of both physical and mental health, but the reasons are not
yet fully understood. In Marriage in Men's Lives Dr. Nock proposes an explanation to this issue. He focuses on marriage as a system of rules, customs, and expectations. The book shows that marriage changes men on basic dimensions of achievement, participation in public social life, and philanthropy because marriage reinforces such behaviors as part of adult masculinity. Men in modern society crave well-being, comfort, luxury, and prestige, and marriage affords a means of achieving
these things within circumscribed legitimate boundaries. Using a huge data base of over 6,000 interviews with men the author has studied since 1979, Nock draws some interesting and far-reaching conclusions about
the nature of marriage, and predicts that marriage is definitely here to stay.
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