Marriage has long been thought to help people maintain healthy lives but things seem to have changed, according to a new study that shows the gap between married and unmarried people has changed over the past few decades.

More exactly, the study published in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior suggests that marriage appears to have lost some of its social, psychological, and financial resources that improve overall health, especially for men. It appears that today’s never-married men suggest they are healthier than never-married guys were three decades ago, which clearly shows that single males have gained some ground in the terms of their health, compared to married people.

“One of the most-often documented facts is that married people are healthier than non-married people, but the difference between married and unmarried people has changed over the past few decades,” lead author of the study, Hui Liu, an assistant professor and sociologist at Michigan State University in east Lansing, said.

For the study, Liu and her colleague Debra Umberson, reviewed 32 years of data on more than 1 million Americans from the National Health Interview Survey. Those involved in the study were between the ages of 25 and 80.

The researchers were surprised to find that the gap between never-married and married men has gotten smaller, as the number of never-married men reporting good health has increased over the past 30 years. The study also found that self-reported health improved for nearly all American blacks, except for those who had been widowed. In 1972, the widowed were about as likely to report good health as the married, but in 2003, they were 7 percent less likely to report good health than their married counterparts were.

As for women, both never-married and married women are reporting themselves healthier than 30 years ago, which means the gap remains about the same.

One explanation for these findings “is that never-married men have greater access to social support now than they did in the past. It used to be that having a spouse was important for social support and a social network,” Liu said. Now, with many of the singles delaying the time of marriage, they find greater support in larger groups of friends.

Given the findings, Liu and her colleagues call for policymakers to reconsider enacting policies and programs that encourage marriage.

“Encouraging marriage in order to promote health may be misguided. In fact, getting married increases one’s risk for eventual marital dissolution and marital dissolution seems to be worse for self-rated health now than at any point in the past three decades,” the researchers wrote in the study.

One thing was unclear about this study: the researchers did not distinguish between mental and physical health. They further plan to study whether social interactions in the widowed population improve both mental and physical health.