Women who become sexually active in their early teens are twice as likely to divorce their partners as those who wait until adulthood.

According to a study, 31 per cent of girls who had sex as under-16 year olds divorced within five years of marriage. Almost half divorced within 10 years; however, 15 per cent of those who waited divorced within five years, and 27 per cent within 10 years.

Experts said early sexual experience “led to the development of behaviors that promote divorce.”

University of Iowa researchers found 31 per cent of women who lost their virginity as teenagers had premarital sex with more than one partner, compared with 24 per cent who waited longer to have sex. One in four who had sex in adolescence had a baby before marriage, compared with one with 10 who did not.

“The results are consistent with the argument that there are downsides to adolescent sexuality, including the increased likelihood of divorce,” said Anthony Paik, the lead researcher.

Here are the most important seven categories of documents required for a divorce:

Income documents. This includes pay stubs and tax returns, with all supporting documents and schedules.
Bank records. This means, at the least, the most recent statement for each account, and if possible all statements going back to the date of marriage.

Retirement and other investment records. This means all pension statements for both spouses dating back to the time of marriage. Also, the last statement prior to marriage can be very significant (especially in community property states) to show the pre-marriage balance.

Credit card statements. The most recent statements are necessary, but a lot of important evidence can be garnered from the historical statements.

Real estate documents. The most important real estate documents are the Deed of Trust and Warranty Deed for any property currently own.

Mortgage statements & any other debts. Recent statements showing the current payoff balance for any other debts are important.

Relevant emails or other correspondence. Correspondence or emails can be extremely helpful pieces of evidence in the case.

Most folks assume that after three-quarters of a century as man and wife, Antonio and Rosa would be immune from divorce and set to enjoy their golden years and the passage into the great beyond. But unfortunately that’s not the case for the Italian couple that is divorcing at the ripe old ages of 99 and 96. After 77 years of marriage, a 99-year-old man (identified only as “Antonio C.”) filed for divorce in Italy on grounds of infidelity.

A few days before Christmas, he was searching through an old chest of drawers and found some letters that his wife, Rosa, 96, had written to a secret lover. He became so upset by his discovery — even though the affair had happened way back in the 1940s — that he immediately told Rosa he wanted a divorce. She tried to convince him otherwise, but there was no dissuading the cuckolded man.

The break-up upset to the couple’s five children, 12 grandchildren, and 1 great-grandchild, who came to take their elders’ marriage for granted since it’s lasted for the better part of eight decades. Though they did have a small hint of trouble ten years ago when they hit a rough patch. Antonio briefly moved to live with one of his sons, but he moved back in with Rosa a few weeks later. This split –if it ends up going through — will beat the previous old person divorce record, which was held by a British couple, Bertie and Jessie Wood, who ended their marriage when they were 98. But they’d only been married for 36 years, which certainly pales in comparison to Rosa and Antonio’s 77-year union.

Cervical and testicular cancer patients have a much higher risk of broken marriages, a Norwegian study found. The study said that wives with cervical cancer are 40 percent more likely to divorce than healthy women and husbands with testicular cancer are 20 percent more likely.

Researchers say these cancers often affect younger patients, who could be vulnerable to the stress that naturally follows a diagnosis. In contrast, older couples have been together longer and may be more committed. These cancers are also more likely to derange plans for parenthood, and these cancers may be more damaging because sexual relationships are important in cementing a marriage.

“It seems to be worse for your marriage to get cancer early,” said Astri Syse, who led the study from the Norwegian Cancer Registry.

Researchers looked at data on 2.8 million people in Norway from 1974 to 2001, including 215,000 cancer survivors. Then they compared the divorce rates of the survivors with couples who were cancer-free.
Overall, cancer patients had lower rates of divorce than other couples. But when they looked at specific malignancies, cervical and testicular were exceptions.

Child support must be paid, and the custodial parent may not deny the supporting parent visitation is he or she does not pay.

This situation comes up when the noncustodial parent, who is usually that father, falls behind in his child support, and the custodial parent, who is usually the mother, decides that his delinquency justifies shutting him out of his children’s lives. This she cannot do. In the eyes of the judge, child support and child visitation are separate issues. Courts frown on parents even attempting to use one to leverage the other. Child support is not payment for the privilege of visitation. A custodial mother whose former husband fails to pay child support must go to court; she cannot take matters in her own hands with a lockout.

Denying visitation may make the equally ill-informed noncustodial parent feel justified about not paying child support.

“All you need is love” goes the refrain of the popular song by the Beatles, but when it comes to marriage it appears that much less romantic considerations determine the success or failure of a relationship. Yes, couples do live happily after going down the aisle, but whether both or one or neither of them smoke cigarettes may be more of a factor in the long-term success than their love.

A couple’s age, previous relationships and even whether they smoke or not are factors that influence whether their marriage is going to last, according to a study by researchers from the Australian National University.

The study — “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” — tracked nearly 2,500 couples from 2001 to 2007 to identify factors associated with those who remained together compared with those who divorced or separated.

The study says “‘good’ marriages – those at lower risk of dissolution” can be identified in “‘laundry’ list [that] might read”:

> husband 1 year to 3 years older than wife

> husband and wife have similar preference for a(nother) child

> husband and wife have same level of education

> Both consume 0-2 standard drinks per day

> Both do not smoke

> Equivalized income of $30,000 to 39,000

> Husband work 35 or more hours per week

> Husband perceives the family as comfortable to prosperous

> Both sets of parents did not separate/divorce

> Husband’s age at marriage is 30-34

> No children born before marriage

> The wife would like another child

Among other conclusions, the study stated that

> a husband who is nine or more years older than his wife is twice as likely to get divorced, as are husbands who get married before they turn 25;

> one-fifth of couples who have kids before marriage — either from a previous relationship or in the same relationship — having separated compared to just nine percent of couples without children born before marriage;

> women who want children much more than their partners are also more likely to get a divorce;

> some 16 percent of men and women whose parents ever separated or divorced experienced marital separation themselves compared to 10 percent for those whose parents did not separate;

> partners on their second or third marriage are 90 percent more likely to separate than spouses who are both in their first marriage;

> up to 16 percent of respondents who indicated they were poor or where the husband — not the wife — was unemployed saying they had separated, compared with only nine percent of couples with healthy finances;

> couples where one partner, and not the other, smokes are also more likely to have a relationship that ends in failure.

The children of a broken home are far more likely to become divorced themselves than the children of an intact marriage, according to a researcher who spend a decade studying broken marriages. The child of divorced parents is at least 40 percent more likely to become divorced than if the parents had not parted, and if the parents married after divorcing, the children face a 91 percent chance of marital breakdown in their own marriages.

“Growing up in a divorced family greatly increases the chances of ending one’s own marriage, a phenomenon called the divorce cycle or the intergenerational transmission of divorce,” says Nicholas H. Wolfinger, assistant professor in the University of Utah’s Department of Family and Consumer Studies.
Wolfinger is the author of Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages, which is the result of a 10-year study of the children of marital failures.

The children of failed marriages are more likely to marry as teens, cohabitate and marry someone who is also a child of divorced parents. They are also one-third less likely to marry if they are over age 20. Wolfinger’s research also suggests that if one spouse comes from divorced parents, the couple may be up to twice as likely to divorce. Spouses who are both children of divorced parents are three times more likely to divorce as couples who both hail from intact families.

“Divorce is an important topic because it has so many consequences for well-being,” writes Wolfinger, who is also an adjunct assistant professor in the University’s Department of Sociology. “Its transmission between generations adds a whole new dimension by perpetuating the cycle of divorce. … The divorce cycle, in short, can be thought of as a cascade. Ending a marriage starts a cycle that threatens to affect increasing numbers of people over time, a sobering thought in an era when half of all new marriages fail.”

He supports no-fault divorce laws, arguing that a return to an age of tough divorce laws would recreate the social conditions that used to make divorce harder on children. “One reason children from divorced families get divorced more often is because they have a tendency to marry as teenagers, [but] the older you are when you marry, the less likely you are to get divorced. It’s good advice for everyone.”

“It is certainly good news that people are less likely to stay in high conflict marriages than they used to.” However, “ending a low-conflict marriage may hurt children as much as staying in a high-conflict family,” and the odds of divorce transmission are actually highest if parents dissolve a marriage after little or no conflict.

On the other hand, the more transitions children experience while growing up, the more they will experience as adults, Wolfinger notes. “What is the hardest for kids is how many disruptions they experience—the up-and-down cycles. Many will have stepparents, and some will see their new families dissolve. A disruption occurs any time they lose a parent - except from death. That’s different, and doesn’t have the same negative effects on children. Divorce is ambiguous. Children wonder whether the divorce was their fault or who is to blame. And they wonder ‘Is he coming back?’”

The divorce cycle can primarily be attributed to the lessons children learn about relationship skills and marital commitment, and secondarily to the effects of parental divorce on offspring marriage formation behavior and educational attainment.

Wolfinger’s research is based on the National Survey of Families and Households, which included detailed information on family background for 13,000 people, and the General Social Survey, which surveyed 20,000 people over a 30-year period. The Bireley Foundation helped fund Wolfinger’s book.

Geneticists now say that roughly 10 per cent of the population is not fathered by the man they believe to be Dad. This revelation, made clear in the course of conducting large population studies as part of disease research and reinforced by individual paternity tests, challenges the long-held assumption of female monogamy and utterly shakes the assumption that women are biologically driven to single-mate bliss.

DNA analysis presents society with all sorts of new ethical problems, and now it’s pulling this naked truth out of the closet and into the courtroom.

Men who call themselves “Duped Dads” are looking for legal redress to protect themselves against paternity fraud, raising questions about the definition of fatherhood. Several U.S. states are considering legislation that could exempt non-biological fathers from having to pay child support.

As one reporter said of this revelation, full siblings become half-siblings, fathers are revealed as genetic strangers to more than one of their children, and uncles who are much closer to their nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Many people are chips off someone else’s block, and attempts to trace the family tree can snap entire branches from it.

Female serial cohabitors – women who have cohabited with more than one man and who often have children of different fathers — have divorce rates roughly 40 percent higher than for women who never cohabited and twice as large as divorce rates for women who cohabited with their husbands only.

According to a study by the Brown University Population and Training Center — “Serial Cohabitation: Implications for Marriage, Divorce, and Public Policy” — most women do not cohabit and only 15 to 20 percent of those who cohabited were involved in multiple cohabitations. The large majority of cohabiting women only cohabit with their husbands.

However, serial cohabitors are overrepresented among economically disadvantaged groups, especially those on welfare. Higher-order or serial cohabitations also are less likely to end in marriage. Even when social, economic, and demographic variables were controlled in a model of divorce, serial cohabitation places women at much greater risk of marital dissolution.

“Playing house,” says lawyer Emily Doskow, may seem like good practice for married life, but it can make living together seem less permanent. “People feel like ‘If it doesn’t work out, we can just step out of this.” Statistics suggest that marriages proceeded by cohabitation enjoy a better chance of success when couples become engaged before moving it.

In an eight-decade study, parental divorce in childhood was the strongest predictor of early death in adulthood.

The study of 1,500 Americans born nearly a century ago is an eight-decade research effort by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, two psychologists who continued the research begun in 1921 by Lewis Terman. This study followed children from the time they were 10 years old until death, decades later. According to one commentary on the study, “[t]he early death of a parent had no measurable effect on children’s life spans or mortality risk, but the long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating.

“Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain, the authors say, among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.”

Overall, those who fared best in the longevity sweepstakes tended to be physically active, to give back to the community, to thrive in work and career, and to have a happy marriage and family life.