Get Married, Have a Heart Attack!

This article in CNN news health section caught my eye. The title of it is "bad marriage could damage your heart". And the first line reads "a lousy marriage might literally make you sick".
Marital strife and other bad personal relationships can raise your risk for heart disease, what it likely boils down to is stress! Stress is a well-known contributor to health problems, as well as a potential byproduct of troubled relationships. What I found interesting in this article is that they have several research questions that then focus down to one. First, it covers two questions on being single. Single male is more likely to develop health risks (such as heart disease, obesity and high blood pressure) and a single woman is less likely to develop them. The research question here would be "Does being single effect your health?" and the variables associated would be single male/female and the increased or decreased health risks.
Now being married is the follow-up to the two prior research questions . And to be very specific, a bad marriage. The article does not operationalize "bad marriage", it just states that study participants with bad relationships have biological evidence of stress that could contribute to heart disease. That includes inflammation and elevated levels of stress hormones.
What is interesting is there was no association between marital woes in general and risks for heart disease or early death. But it did find, over a 10-year follow-up, that women who keep silent during marital arguments had an increased risk of dying compared with wives who expressed their feelings during fights. What appeared to matter more for men was just being married; married men were less likely to die during the follow-up than single men. So what is the real answer here? Independent variable is bad marriage and the dependent is bad health. Bad marriage, bad for both woman and men, more so for woman. Being single, better for woman. The article ends with that there is a weak association that doesn't prove bad relationships can cause heart disease, but they can't rule it out. I had to get a chuckle out of this entire article because in big bold letters it tells you that you are basically going to die if you are in a bad marriage then literally the last two sentences states that there is not enough evidence to prove the link. Then why write it?