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.

Couples with twins or triplets are more likely to divorce, “with financial stress playing a major role in break-ups,” according to a study by Birmingham University’s School of Social Policy.

Research showed 28 percent of the parents of twins or triplets divorced, compared with 24 percent of other families.
The study, “The Effects of Twins and Multiple Births Families and Their Living Standards,” showed that financial pressures are among the most common reasons for the breakdown of families. The report, supported by the Twin and Multiple Births Association (TAMBA), concludes that families with multiple births reported a drop in the income following the births of the children.

These families were twice as likely as families of “singletons” to report “quite difficult” financial stress and were also more likely to be in arrears on bill payments and to have exhausted savings. Twins and triplets experience higher levels of material deprivation as parents struggled to pay for “key child-related items,” including holidays, school uniforms, birthday parties and leisure equipment.

Steve McKay, Birmingham professor of social research, said that “twins and triplets are more likely to be born to married and older couples, who are in paid employment. These factors should provide some degree of ‘protection’ against low income and deprivation, so it is deeply concerning that twins and triplets are experiencing greater levels of material deprivation than singletons and that families are at greater risk of separation and divorce.

The study analyzes government statistics. It concludes that 62 percent of the multiple birth families were worse off financially after the babies, compared with 40 percent of other families.

Getting married and staying married are good for a person’s health, even when it is followed by remarriage, carries specific long-term negative effects on health.

The study, which was published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, tracked the marital status of 8,652 people aged 51 to 61 over a period of 18 years. The study, by Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, and Mary Elizabeth Hughes, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, examines both marital transitions and a wide range of health dimensions.

Among other findings, the study concludes the following:

> Married people who had been divorced had worse health in every area examined than those who had never been divorced.

> Among people widowed and divorced, those who did not remarry had worse health than those who did.

> Remarried people had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more physical limitations than “continuously married people.”

> Divorced people endured variety of more health problems than continuously married people, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer and mobility.

The research suggests that the loss of a spouse through death or divorce takes an immediate and long-lasting toll on the physical and mental health of those affected. It suggests that the stress and financial uncertainty of living along after the loss of apparent does not diminish with time and compromises a person’s health years later.

Here are what are called the “five deadliest marriage sins that can wreck an otherwise good marriage and send you in search of a divorce lawyer”:

1. Be a bore.

2. Cultivate the attitude a belief that your spouse owes you.

3. Eliminate the gene for pleasure. In other words, try to be a miserable bitch or SOB all the time despite the best efforts of your spouse to make you happy.

4. Make your spouse feel inadequate, unworthy and unattractive.

5. Care only about yourself.

At least 66% of all the divorced couples in America are childless. This is also one of the main reasons of getting divorced, according to experts. Statistics also reveal that couples with children have lower chances of getting divorced than childless people

A new study by the Centers for Disease Control reveals some surprising statistics about love marriage. Namely, if you want your love to last, get married. And then have some children.

The Marriage and Cohabitation Study, which began in 2002, tracked the relationships of 12,571 men and women ages 15 to 44. Of those, over 40 percent were married and 9 percent were living together. According to the study, marriages without children had only a 34 percent chance of lasting 10 years, compared with 79 percent for those where woman gave birth eight or more months after getting married.

Despite the studies, including one by the Childless by Choice Project study, that suggest that couples without children are motivated to remain married without children because of marital satisfaction, the risk of divorce remains. In fact, childfree couples are just as likely to divorce as couples with children.

However, an article entitled “Modern Marriage Risks Amplified by Children,” which was published in Unscripted, states that divorce is much less problematic for the childless. Writes J. Bushnell: “[N]onparent couples don’t have to stick out a bad or abusive relationship for fear of supporting a household or raising children alone. Unlike parents, childfree couples don’t have to worry about how a divorce will impact children; instead, they can split their assets 50/50, move on, and even move away, without concerns about taking a child away from its school district or nonresidential parent.”

Bushnell also notes that the risks of divorce are much higher for women than for men if they have children. “As 80% of children live with their mother following a divorce, perhaps women should seriously consider before starting a family whether they are equipped to parent alone one day if their marriage fails. Because single motherhood is clearly a very strong possibility. Imagine a drive-through wedding chapel in Las Vegas and the Elvis impersonator/ordained minister who is about to marry you asks, “You have a fifty-fifty chance of ending up as single mother, are you still going to say ‘I do’ and have kids with this guy?”

A Canadian study suggests that divorce people are a higher risk of depression than those who stayed married. The study revealed that divorced men were six times more likely to report a bout of depression, and that divorced women were more than three times more likely to do so.

The survey found that 12 per cent of people who were no longer in a relationship reported a new episode of depression, while just three per cent of those who remained in a relationship had suffered new depression. Moreover, more than three-quarters of those who suffered depression in the post-relationship period were no longer depressed four years after the breakup, the findings show. “It sort of suggests that, for the majority, the effects of your relationship breaking up … people seem to get back on their feet but there is this significant minority for whom trouble seems to persist,” said Michelle Rotermann, the author of the study.

“Perhaps one of the reasons why men are more at risk of experiencing subsequent depression is because one of their main sources of social support is their partner, their spouse, and now she is no longer there,” said Rotermann, an analyst at Statistics Canada.Nineteen per cent of men who were no longer with their spouse found a decline in social support, while only six per cent of men who remained in a relationship found a drop. Among women the proportions were 11 per cent for those no longer in a relationship and five for those who were.

Jennifer Tipper, a research associate with the Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa, said “typically women are much better at building and maintaining social supports, which isn’t often the case for men.

“She said the study is a good reminder that the breakdown of a marriage is an extremely challenging transition for everybody involved. “We sometimes tend to think that it’s the woman who bears the brunt of a divorce outcome. And there is no question that women experience higher levels of economic strife. What we tend to forget in many instances, for the men in particular, they see children all but removed from their lives, which is a huge impact on your life.

“The study was based on longitudinal data from the National Population Health Survey. The analysis used five cohorts of observations of more than 2,000 men and 2,000 women, taken at two-year intervals. The respondents were between the ages of 20 and 64.

A new psychological research suggests that a rocky marriage and the incidence of divorce are far higher in couples engaged in stressful jobs and exhausting work.

Dr. Michael Aamodt, an industrial psychologist at Radford University in Virginia, devised a formula to establish the success of a marriage based on the career of one of the partners in order to analyze the propensity to divorce for major occupational categories. He used the formula (separated plus divorced) divided by (total population minus never married) to yield the percentage of people in 449 occupations who had been married but were no longer together.

Based on this, Aamodt says dancers, choreographers and bartenders have 40 percent chance of splitting up. The risk of break-up was equally high in marriages of nurses, psychiatrists and those who help the elderly and disabled. Chefs and mathematicians shared a 20 percent chance of splitting while journalists and urban planners had a 17.54 percent chance. Librarians, dieticians and fitness instructors had a 16.89 percent chance of breaking up. In addition, travel agents, writers and police had 16 percent chance of divorce, slightly higher than fire fighters and teachers. Marriages of vets and funeral directors were likely to be a little more successful than that of judges and magistrates, who had a 12 percent of ending in divorce. According to researchers, the key to marital bliss was marriage to agricultural engineers, optometrists, dentists, clergyman and podiatrists, which carry a 2-7 percent chance of ending in divorce.

Aamodt said, “What is interesting is that those involved in caring professions experience a high level of break-up. This might be because they spend too long caring for other people at the cost of their own families, or because they are naturally sensitive people who are more vulnerable and sensitive in their own relationship.”

The pain and trauma of miscarriage or stillbirth appears to make it harder for couples to stay together. While such personal tragedies can bring some couples closer, pregnancy loss “appears to increase the overall risk of divorce or separation—an effect that can last for years after the pregnancy loss.”

According to a recent study, the first and largest of its kind, couples who had a miscarriage are 22% more likely to break up, and those who experienced a stillbirth are 40% more likely to do so.

These findings shouldn’t lead people to “be alarmed and assume that just because someone has had a pregnancy loss, they will also have their relationship dissolved,” says the lead author of the study, Katherine Gold, M.D., an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School, in Ann Arbor. “Most couples do very well and often become closer after loss.”

Although most couples broke up within one-and-a-half to three years after losing a baby, the increased risk of divorce or separation could still be seen up to a decade after the event, especially in couples that experienced stillbirth.

“[H]ealth-care professionals, society, and friends and family need to be aware that pregnancy loss can have a profound impact on families,” she said.

Losing a pregnancy is fairly common, Dr. Gold and her colleagues note in the study, published in the journal Pediatrics. Although just 1% of pregnancies end in stillbirth, roughly 15%—more than 1 in 7—end in miscarriage, which is defined as a pregnancy loss before 20 weeks’ gestation.

Many people think that rural America enjoys a Garden-of-Eden innocence from divorce. At one time, rural American divorced much less frequently than those who lived in cities. No more. In divorce, rural America has caught up.

The geographic distinction have now all but vanished and now, “for the first time, rural Americans are just as likely to be divorced as city dwellers,” according to a recent analysis by The New York Times.

Places like Sioux County, Iowa, which had a divorce rate as recently as 1970 so low “that it resembled the rest of America in the 1910s,” now mirror the rest of America. Since 1970, the county has seen a sevenfold increase in divorce - “giving the county the unwelcome distinction of being a standout in this category in census data.”

“Rural families are going through this incredible transformation,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a professor of sociology at Cornell University. Shifts in values - women working and “gaining autonomy and rearranging the order of traditional families” have spread from cities to rural places. Moreover, blue-collar men have lost ground in the last 40 years, even as women have made gains.

Leo Averbach, the author of a powerful book on the pain and suffering of divorce, believes that the reason second and third marriages fail, is “there is less glue holding the marriage together.”

Averbach, the author of Break Up, was married for twenty years and the father of three children when his marriage failed. The emotional trauma of the experience gave him the material for his widely praised book about his experience.

“I think that the major factor affecting the break up of second and third marriages is that there is less glue holding the marriage together. Marriage, as an institution, is primarily intended as framework for raising children, for building a family. The great majority of children born to married couples are born during their first marriage, when the parents are up to about thirty-five years old.” Averback suggests that most couples in second marriage do not have common children to bind them together in a positive sense and, in a negative sense, to force them to stay together if the marriage goes down hill. Because the children are not there, the element of family is not as central, so the desire to preserve the family – and make the necessary compromises – is not there. Overall, therefore, there is less commitment.

Statistics suggest that in the United States, about 50 percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second and 74 percent of third marriages end on the rocks.