Where those first mistakes are made..

Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) -The divorce rate in Switzerland reached 48.4 percent in 2008, according to SwissStatistics, a 10 percentage point increase since 2001. And according to the statisticians there is nothing to stop the divorce rate from increasing indefinitely. Unless a way could be found to minimize the risks of an eventual divorce at the outset.

A group of Swiss researchers from the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva believe they have found that way. They propose a mathematical approach that “allocates spouses in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of divorce or separation”. They assume a “central agency”, call it a matchmaking service, that coordinates the matching of couples in an efficient way. Their work appears in the European Journal of Operational Research.

The authors conclude that people fall in love and get married for all the wrong reasons: shared pursuits, tastes, physical attraction. If people limited themselves to the objective factors, their lives together would last much longer.

Basing their work on a study of 1074 representative Swiss couples still married after initial interviews five years earlier, and taking into account “objective factors” like age, social background, ethnicity, educational levels and prior divorce rates, they come up with results that show that “the current state of marriage is well below the social optimum”. They would reallocate 68 percent of the couples under study in order to ensure a higher rate of survival. In other words, almost seven out of 10 couples that are together today the old-fashioned way will not last.

According to the study, a couple – neither of them previously divorced – in which a woman who is better educated than her partner, who must be at least five years her senior, has the best chance of surviving. The worst combination is two equally educated individuals where the woman is five years older than her partner.

Link to other site: Daily Mail

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