Couples Over 50 Are More Likely To Divorce When The Wife Gets Sick, Study Suggests

Couples vow on their wedding days to love one another in sickness and in health, but apparently, that's not a promise they always keep. A new study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior has found that when a wife gets sick, marriages are more likely to end in divorce than "till death do us part." Researchers at Iowa State University looked at 2,701 couples over the age of 50 from the Health and Retirement Study, conducted between 1992 and 2010. They wanted to see if a diagnosis of cancer, heart problems, lung disease and/or stroke could potentially affect marital outcomes. And it did, but only for women: A wife's major illness was associated with a 6 percent higher probability of subsequent divorce, while a husband's illness had no effect on divorce rates whatsoever. "This work has gotten a lot of pretty strong personal reactions from individuals that I've talked to," Amelia Karraker, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of human development and family studies at Iowa State University, told The Huffington Post. "People have said, 'This happened to my friend' or 'This happened to me -- I got breast cancer and then my husband asked for a divorce.'" Before you get too depressed, there are some caveats. For one, most divorces occur much earlier in life -- around age 30 -- than the older demographic of the study's sample, so wives' illnesses aren't necessarily huge drivers of divorce in general. In fact, a 2010 study found that, in younger peo...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news