London – Promising at the altar to have and to hold your loved one, in sickness and in health, may seem like a straightforward pledge.
But for men, some elements of the vow can prove easier to keep than others.
A study shows that a couple is more likely to divorce if the wife falls ill. The researchers said their results indicate that some men simply cannot cope with a poorly spouse.
After tracking 2,700 couples in the US from 1992 to 2010, the American team found that divorce levels were roughly the same between healthy couples and those in which the husband suffered sickness.
But when disease hit the wife, the likelihood of divorce rose.
Every two years the researchers interviewed the couples and asked whether either of them had been ill since their last session. Over the 18 years, 859 marriages ended in divorce, 32 per cent of the sample group.
For 24 per cent of the couples, tragedy struck when one spouse died, and 44 per cent were still going strong by the time the study ended. But among the 965 couples in which the woman got sick, the rate of divorce was 6 per cent higher.
Lead author Amelia Karraker, assistant professor in family studies at Iowa State University, said illness can add stress to a marriage because men may not be as attuned to taking on a caregiver role as women. ‘There is a difference between feeling too sick to make dinner and needing someone to actually feed you,’ she said.
‘That’s something that can really change the dynamics within a marriage. If your spouse is too sick to work, we know that financial strain is a major predictor of divorce.’
Karraker said wives may also become dissatisfied with their husbands’ ability to look after them. She added: ‘Life or death experiences may cause people to re-evaluate what is important in their lives.
‘It could be that women are saying, “You’re doing a bad job of caring for me or I wasn’t happy with the relationship to begin with, and I’d rather be alone than in a bad marriage.”’
The research was published in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour.
Daily Mail