Which professions are most likely to kill a marriage?
A successful marriage depends on a lot of factors — a strong emotional bond, realistic expectations, a lot of trust, and clear communication, just to name a few. But to what extent does your career choose impact the success, or failure, of your marriage?
Popular UK dating site, FreeDating.co, has released a study of the correlation between different professional fields and divorce rates. It turns out that people in certain professions are more likely than others to end up divorced.
Professionals with high divorce rates included athletes, performers, dancers, nurses, psychiatric care givers, home heath aids, telephone operators, factory workers, gaming service workers, massage therapists, bartenders, dancers, and choreographers.
The root causes of discord
Although the study didn’t dig deeply into the reasons why certain professionals are more likely to divorce, we can draw our own conclusions. Clearly, professions that demand long work days and irregular schedules strain relationships, leaving couples with little quality time to spend together.
Even if you are making time for your spouse, if your job leaves you feeling irritable or drained, you will have less emotional energy and attention to share with your partner. For example, nurses who provide patient care and witness trauma regularly may feel too emotionally exhausted after work to be sweet to their spouse.
Similarly, factory workers who perform physically demanding labor may simply be too tired at the end of the day to make romance.
Mind your marriage
One of the best ways to make sure that your work life doesn’t kill your marriage is to be sure to share household chores evenly. Research by the London School of Economics found that spouses who don’t equally share household tasks, such as cleaning and childcare, are twice as likely to divorce as couples who try to make sure that chores are evenly divided.
The double burden of a career combined with household tasks that often falls upon women leave wives feeling stretched too thin to prioritize their marriages, sometimes resulting in divorce.
