7 Strange Reasons You May End Up Divorced, According to Science

Maybe there’s too much stress when you’re stuck in traffic. Or maybe you miss quality time together while stuck on the road. 

Whatever the reason, when your commute to work is 45 minutes or more each way, you’re more likely to divorce, finds a 2013 Swedish study published in the journal Urban Studies. 

The study tracked millions of Swedes over a 10-year period and found that 14 percent of the couples in which one or both partners had a long commute split up, as opposed to 10 percent of the couples who worked closer to home.

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There’s that moment when all your pals are getting married or having kids, and you start to think you should, too. Turns out the same thing happens with divorce, according to a study published in Social Forces.

The phenomenon grows the closer you are to it: Study participants were 75 percent more likely to divorce if a close friend or family member divorced, and 33 percent more likely to split if a friend of a friend called it quits. 

But the power of influence can be positive, too: The study also suggests that helping a friend improve a rocky marriage may actually improve your own.

Related: 10 Things You Should Never Say to Someone Going Through a Divorce

Having a firstborn daughter leads to divorce more often than having a firstborn son, according to 60 years of U.S. census data. Plus, an unmarried couple is 42 percent more likely to marry if their first child is a boy, says a University of Washington study.

Does this suggest that fathers are more important to boys or that boys are more important to fathers? The jury is still out. 

The prevailing wisdom from older studies said the demands of working as a physician increased your likelihood of getting divorced. It turns out the opposite is true—sort of: A recent analysis of census data in the BMJ found that physicians actually had a lower rate of divorce than dentists, health care executives, nurses, and lawyers. 

But there’s a caveat: Female physicians who worked more than 40 hours per week actually had a higher rate of divorce. The opposite was true for men: When a male doctor worked more than 40 hours per week, his divorce rate dropped.

Related: 11 Early Warning Signs Of Divorce Most People Miss

In a Norwegian study, couples who split chores 50-50 actually had a higher rate of divorce. The study author suggests that these couples create a business-like partnership that leads to unhappiness rather than a relationship filled with generosity, intimacy, and spontaneity. 

While heavy drinking and addiction is associated with higher rates of divorce in general, the numbers spike if the wife drinks significantly more than her husband, finds a study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. 

The study looked at alcohol consumption and rates of divorce in nearly 20,000 couples. Couples who didn’t drink or drank the same amount had a lower rate of divorce. And while the rate of divorce went up when a man drank more than his wife, it actually tripled when a woman imbibed more excessively than her husband.

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In the 1970s, 21 percent of women had never had sex before they got married, compared to just 5 percent of women in the 2010s. In decades past, people thought that having multiple sexual partners before marriage would lead to a less happy union and, eventually, divorce. 

But according to a recent analysis of National Survey of Family Growth data from the University of Utah, two may actually be the unluckiest number. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, women who had exactly two premarital sex partners had the highest rates of divorce—around 25 to 30 percent, which is less than women with either three, four to five, or six to nine partners.

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It wasn’t until the 2000s that women with 10 or more partners surpassed the women with just two as the group with the highest divorce rates. 

“Having two partners may lead to uncertainty, but having a few more apparently leads to greater clarity about the right man to marry,” writes lead study author Nicholas H. Wolfinger. 

The article 10 Really Weird Causes of Divorce was originally published by our partners at Prevention.com.