According to the Business Insider, there are 7 key predictors of Divorce !
Social scientists have discovered 7 key predictors that your relationship is headed for Divorce:
1. Getting married in your teens or over the age of mid 30 have a higher risk of getting divorce. The best age for getting married is in your late 20’s according to Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor at the University of Utah. Also a higher age gap between couples increases your likelihood of Divorce according to Megan Garber at The Atlantic advising 1 year age gap is 3%, 5 year age gap 18% and a 10 year age gap a whopping 39%
2. According to a Harvard study, published in the American Sociological Review, suggests having a husband who doesn’t work full time increases the risk of divorce and that it's not a couple's finances that affect their chances of divorce, but rather the division of labour.
3. The Bureau of Labour Statistics website National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979) of a group of baby boomers whereby over half of marriages ended in divorce for those who did not finish high school versus 30% of those who had graduated from college. This could be due to lower educational attainment which predicts lower income resulting in a more stressful life.
4. John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington calls certain relationship behaviours the "four horsemen of the apocalypse". That's because they predict divorce with scary-high accuracy:
· Contempt: Seeing your partner as beneath you. (Gottman calls this behavior the "kiss of death" for a relationship.)
· Criticism: Turning a behaviour into a statement about your partner's character.
· Defensiveness: Playing the victim during difficult situations.
· Stonewalling: Blocking off conversation.
5. Being overly affectionate as newlyweds were more likely to divorce after 7 years than those that were one third less affectionate. Aviva Patz summed it up in Psychology Today: "Couples whose marriages begin in romantic bliss are particularly divorce-prone because such intensity is too hard to maintain. Believe it or not, marriages that start out with less 'Hollywood romance' usually have more promising futures."
6. Withdrawing during conflict – A 2014 study, published in the journal Communication Monographs, suggests that couples engaged in "demand/withdraw" patterns - i.e. one partner pressuring the other and receiving silence in return - are less happy in their relationships.
7. Describing your relationship in a negative way. In one study, published in 2000 in the Journal of Family Psychology, Gottman and colleagues put 95 newlywed couples through the oral history interview. Results showed that couples' scores on certain measures predicted the strength or weakness of their marriage.
Those measures included:
· Fondness for each other
· "We"-ness: How much each spouse emphasizes unification in the marriage
· Expansiveness: How much each partner elaborates on what the other is saying
· Negativity
· Disappointment in the marriage
· How much the couple describes their marriage as chaotic
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