A new study has found that gay men can avoid some of the downfalls of aging if they have a committed, legally recognized partner to get through it with. 

According to the study in the American Journal of Public Health, gay men over 50 stress out over aging, discrimination, and losing friends in the AIDS epidemic. But having a legally recognized spouse or domestic partner has been proven to help calm some of these feelings - which should not really come as a surprise to anyone. 

“This study shines a light on the mental health of a generation of gay men who survived the early years of the AIDS crisis and came of age on the heels of the gay rights movement,” Williams Institute scholar and researcher Richard G. Wight, Ph.D., said in a statement Thursday. “Whether legal marriage benefits mental health within same-sex couples in the way it has been proven to benefit different-sex couples deserves much more empirical attention, particularly given that same-sex marriage is not available in most states and was only briefly available in California in 2008.”

Like I said, this isn’t terribly shocking. It seems as though this should be true of any person, although it makes sense that the unique stresses of an aging gay man can be helped by - surprise - another aging gay man. What do you think?