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.

A British study of 3,500 British couples published recently suggests that couples where the man helps out with housework, shopping and childcare have lower divorce rates.

“Men’s Unpaid Work and Divorce,” which was published by the London School of Economics (LSE), found that the more husbands helped out, the lower the incidence of divorce.

The research said its conclusions undermined the theory running since the 1960s that marriages were most stable when men focused on paid work and women were responsible for housework. The study concluded that “[t]he lowest-risk combination is one in which the mother does not work and the father engages in the highest level of housework and childcare.”

Researcher Wendy Sigle-Rushton said while economists have spent much time examining and trying to explain the link between women going to work and divorce rates, “they have paid very little attention to the behavior of men. This research… suggests that fathers’ contribution to unpaid work at home stabilizes marriage regardless of mothers’ employment status.”

The study analyzed married couples that had their first child in 1970, a time when most mothers of young children stayed at home. “The results suggest that the risk of divorce among working mothers, while greater, is substantially reduced when fathers contribute more to housework and childcare,” she said.

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.

Research from the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project suggests that consumer debt assaults marriages and “plays a powerful role in eroding the quality of married life.” In fact, if spouses argue about finances once a week, their marriage is 30 percent more likely to end in divorce than those who fight about money less frequently.

According to Jeffrey Dew, an assistant professor of Family, Consumer, and Human Development at Utah State University and the author of the Marriage Project’s report Thrifty Couples Are the Happiest, “[c]onsumer debt fuels a sense of financial unease among couples, and increases the likelihood that they will fight over money matters; moreover, this financial unease casts a pall over marriages in general, raising the likelihood that couples will argue over issues other than money and decreasing the time they spend with one another….”

Consumer debt, Dew says, is also “an equal-opportunity marriage destroyer. It does not matter if couples are rich or poor, working class or middle class. If they accrue substantial debt, it puts a strain on their marriage.”

By comparison, assets “sweeten and solidify the ties between spouses. Assets minimize any sense of financial unease that couples feel, with the result that they experience less conflict….”

Fighting over money changes the center of gravity in a marriage. “[C]onflict over money matters is one of the most important problems in contemporary married life. Compared with disagreements over other topics, financial disagreements last longer, are more salient to couples, and generate more negative conflict tactics… ”

Newly wed couples can start out on the right foot steering clear of materialism and consumer debt; they “are much more likely to enjoy connubial bliss.”

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.

According to a recent study by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML), more divorce cases now involve evidence gleaned from social media, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and Photobucket.

As long ago as the days of the hotel divorce (where a private eye and his photographer captured an adulterous couple in an indiscreet moment) photographic evidence has often played a part in divorce actions; but now “all they need to do is go online to find evidence on profile pages, wall comments, status reports, and photo files. Incriminating photos and other information … is not usually the image the opposing parent wanted to portray before a judge and the evidence can definitely affect alimony disputes and custody fight. A parent could easily lose custody, alimony, or both due to inappropriate behavior online.”

Jason Krafsky and his wife Kelli, the authors of Facebook and Your Marriage, believe it is not the media site that creates the problem, “it’s the user’s behavior.”

“Lack of boundaries is a huge issue,” says Krafsky. “If you don’t have good boundaries you have no business being on Facebook or any other cyberspace social networking or game sites. It’s just too risky. The other issue is when people get caught for crossing the line they usually don’t handle it well. Whether it is Facebook or something else, establishing personal boundaries is a part of everyday life with friends, co-workers, clients, and extended family members. Setting up boundaries around your marriage relationship is key to proactively protecting yourself, your spouse, your marriage, your kids, and your reputation.”

Many people going through divorce notice that casual friends seem to hold them at arm’s length – as if they had a disease. And social commentators often speak of the divorce epidemic they claim is sweeping the country. Many people think of divorce in metaphors of disease and illness.

Well, it turns out there may be something more to this than just a metaphor.

A 32-year study at Brown University that followed 12,000 people in Farmington, Massachusetts, suggests that “the negative feelings and emotions surrounding divorce are quite contagious and simply knowing someone involved in a divorce exponentially increases [a person’s] chances of divorce” especially if the individuals involved are close.

The study, which is titled “Breaking up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed 32 Years,” found that divorce between immediate friends or relatives can increase a person’s chances of being divorced by 75 percent. “Even the divorce of friend of a friend” increases the likelihood of a split by 33 percent. “The effects spread like a virus in a phenomenon the study describes as ‘divorce clustering.’” When a brother or a sister divorce, the changes that a sibling will divorce go up 22 percent.

“Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly involved,” the study states.

Census data suggests that older couples are getting divorces later in life. According to the Census Bureau, 26 percent of the divorces in 2008 were filed by couples married 20 years or more.

This information stands in contrast to the long-held assumption that long-term marriages become more and more immune to divorce. “This is not a reassuring trend for society, as rebuilding your life after a divorce is difficult under the best circumstances and starting over as a senior citizen will prove to be a huge obstacle for those unlucky enough to find themselves in that situation.”

Gray-haired spouses may not face the challenges of a divorce involving child custody and support, but “[a] divorce late in life brings the risk of increased long-term financial instability for both parties and it might be more important for seniors to create a viable divorce plan than it is for any other age or demographic group in the nation.”

SafeGuard Guaranty Corp. looked at the divorce statistics and now offers divorce insurance called WedLock.

If the marriage crashes, WedLock “provides financial assistance in the form of cash to cover the costs of the legal proceeding - as well as other expenses that might arise like setting up a new apartment or house after a divorce.”

Each unit of WedLock insurance costs $15.99 a month and provides a benefit of $1,250 to cover divorce expenses. Customers are encouraged to purchase multiple units of the insurance.

Wedlock is not intended for short-term marriages. “In order prevent people who are already planning to get a divorce from taking advantage of the insurance, Safeguard requires a period of 48 months of marriage before a policy is considered matured and the pay-off is guaranteed.

“Every year almost half of all families that go through divorce end up below the poverty line. And the reason is that on average, people lose 77% of their total net worth as a result of divorce, so WedLock Divorce Insurance℠ may certainly offset some or all of that loss depending on the size of the policy purchased.”