SleekandBouncy
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Divorce is contagious: Why there is a 75% chance your marriage will fail if your friends split
By David Derbyshire (Mail Online)
Last updated at 10:18 AM on 5th July 2010
If your best friends' marriage is falling apart then beware, yours could also be heading for the rocks.
Researchers have discovered that divorce is catching and spreads like a disease through families, work places and groups of friends.
The domino effect means that if an immediate friend or colleague splits up, your own chance of divorce increases by 75 per cent.
Even the break-up of a friend-of-a-friend's marriage boosts your chances of divorce by a third, scientists say.
The researchers describe the effect as 'divorce clustering' - and believe that break-ups within friendship groups force couples to start questioning their own relationships.
They say that a friend's divorce can also reduce the social stigma of splitting up, even when children are involved.
The findings come from a continuing study into the lives of more than 12,000 Americans living in the New England town of Framingham since 1948.
The researchers - led by Dr Rose McDermott of Brown University, Rhode Island - found that every divorce sends ripples through friends, families and work colleagues. These results go beyond previous work intimating a person-toperson effect to suggest a person-to-person-to-person effect,' said Dr McDermott.
Individuals who get divorced may influence not only their friends, but their friends' friends as the propensity to divorce spreads.'
She added: 'A person's tendency to divorce depends not just on his friend's divorce status, but also extends to his friend's friend.
'The full network shows that participants are 75 per cent more likely to be divorced if a person - obviously other than their spouse - that they are directly connected to is divorced.
'The size of the effect for people at two degrees of separation, for example the friend of a friend, is 33 per cent. At three degrees the effect disappears.' It wasn't just friends who split up that had an impact on someone's relationship.
Divorce among family members and work mates also increased the chances of someone's own marriage ending, the study found.
It also suggests that knowing lots of divorced people can be bad for your marriage. The more divorced people that you know, the riskier your own marriage. And while many couples cling to the belief that children reduce their risk of divorce, the scientists found it made no difference.
By David Derbyshire (Mail Online)
Last updated at 10:18 AM on 5th July 2010
If your best friends' marriage is falling apart then beware, yours could also be heading for the rocks.
Researchers have discovered that divorce is catching and spreads like a disease through families, work places and groups of friends.
The domino effect means that if an immediate friend or colleague splits up, your own chance of divorce increases by 75 per cent.
Even the break-up of a friend-of-a-friend's marriage boosts your chances of divorce by a third, scientists say.
The researchers describe the effect as 'divorce clustering' - and believe that break-ups within friendship groups force couples to start questioning their own relationships.
They say that a friend's divorce can also reduce the social stigma of splitting up, even when children are involved.
The findings come from a continuing study into the lives of more than 12,000 Americans living in the New England town of Framingham since 1948.
The researchers - led by Dr Rose McDermott of Brown University, Rhode Island - found that every divorce sends ripples through friends, families and work colleagues. These results go beyond previous work intimating a person-toperson effect to suggest a person-to-person-to-person effect,' said Dr McDermott.
Individuals who get divorced may influence not only their friends, but their friends' friends as the propensity to divorce spreads.'
She added: 'A person's tendency to divorce depends not just on his friend's divorce status, but also extends to his friend's friend.
'The full network shows that participants are 75 per cent more likely to be divorced if a person - obviously other than their spouse - that they are directly connected to is divorced.
'The size of the effect for people at two degrees of separation, for example the friend of a friend, is 33 per cent. At three degrees the effect disappears.' It wasn't just friends who split up that had an impact on someone's relationship.
Divorce among family members and work mates also increased the chances of someone's own marriage ending, the study found.
It also suggests that knowing lots of divorced people can be bad for your marriage. The more divorced people that you know, the riskier your own marriage. And while many couples cling to the belief that children reduce their risk of divorce, the scientists found it made no difference.
, but I do hope to read it soon) but my understanding of it is that Gladwell essentially posits ideas and innovations as being, to borrow from the authors of this study, analogous to "contagions." What I keep thinking about is this: if you live in a community that is disenfranchised from mainstream society, certain philosophies and behaviors will be inculcated amongst members of that community and become the norm. At the heart of such norms are ideas that became contagious; once they're internalized, they become endemic to that group. I'm purposefully borrowing from epidemiological terminology to be consistent with the "contagion" idea that the researchers used. In this light, it would make perfect sense that amongst certain groups of people, divorce is normalized, obesity is not a concern, and men wouldn't want to be fathers or husbands. I this is an extremely simplistic argument but it kind of makes sense (I hope).
