The Number One Predictor of Divorce Is…

According to a recent Harvard study, the #1 indicator of risk of divorce is whether or not the husband has a full time job.

Many issues can contribute to conflict within a marriage, including long-term sickness or disability, differences in handling money, and division of household chores.

However, according to a study recently published in the American Sociological Review, with information obtained from 6,300 married couples interviewed between 1968 and 2013, couples faced a 32% higher divorce risk when the husband was unemployed versus marriages where the husband had a full-time job and was contributing to the family’s finances.

Alexandra Killewald, the study’s author and a professor of sociology at Harvard suggested that for men a sense of identity and worth may be tied to their job, which could have a long-term impact on the health of a marriage.

“I could speculate that losing a job might bring with it depression or some other kinds of mental health issues,” Alexandra Killewald said on the Today show. This could also further explain why some marriages don’t survive this impact.

What does this mean for stay-at-home-dads? There wasn’t enough data to accurately say, but Killewald suggests that this sort of circumstance is usually pre-planned and therefore exempt from the same consequences.