This Is the #1 Predictor of Divorce, According to Harvard Researchers
When you look at what causes marital strife, there are plenty of variables at play - long-term illness, money woes, and, heck, even how you split the chores - but recent research out of Harvard points to a new culprit: whether or not the husband has a full-time job.
According to a study published in the American Sociological Review, with data sourced 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.
As far as what affects your divorce chances more - contributions in the home or outside of it - it also depends on when you got hitched. The researchers found that couples who married before 1975 experienced more marital issues related to housework and wives not doing enough, but for couples who got married after 1975, there was more tension when the husband was unemployed. Why is this important? Before 1975, less women were working full-time - which meant husbands expected their wives to play a bigger part in household chores. But since more women were joining the workforce around 1975, things shifted. While women weren't expected to take care of the household chores as much as they once were, men were still expected to be a main source of income.
A woman's sense of identity used to come from her duties as a wife and homemaker. Now that more women are working, that sense of identity has evolved. For men, however, his sense of identity and worth may be tied to his 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, the study's author and a professor of sociology at Harvard, said on the Today show. This might 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.
