Michael J Rohrbaugh, co-director of the University of Arizona’s Family Research Laboratory, who is conducting a study of heart patients, said pronouns that couples use in speech, whether it is “me” or “us”, seem to predict the course of a spouse’s heart disease during the subsequent six months. “There is something about ‘we talk’, the collective or communal idea that ‘we are in it together’ which is important,” Rohrbaugh said.

Although that study is not completed, Rohrbaugh said the connection between “we talk” and health appears to be stronger in women than men.

For women with heart disease, repeatedly using the words “I” or “me,” he said, “is like the kiss of death”.

And a 2003 study in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry found that after marital spats, blisters generally healed more slowly, a sign that stress interfered with immune system functioning.

In hostile couples, those who hurled insults or rolled their eyes when arguing, the healing was 60 per cent slower than in couples who didn’t display antagonistic behaviors, the study showed. Women tended to take longer to heal than men.

Ohio State University psychology professor Janice Klecolt-Glaser, who led that study, said men are less sensitive than women to negative emotional nuances.

Eaker and colleagues at Boston University tracked 1,768 men and 1,912 women between the ages 18 and 77. They were drawn from the Framingham offspring study, a large epidemiological study of people whose parents were from Framingham, Massachusetts.

When asked what they fought over, men said sex and women said money, children and chores. Men were more likely than women to report that their marriages were happy and that their spouses loved them.

... contd.