Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Love and Marriage

So,
I read this in someone else's blog:
"The divorce rate (according to some PBS documentary) is about 90% for people who marry in med school or during residency."

Does anyone know if this is true?

I know that divorce rates HAVE been linked to specialty choice but I'm not sure about timing of the nuptuals. I does make sense that things might get a little rocky during residency, especially if the person you marry is a non-medic, but I would like to see the hard facts!

I also heard that people who live together before marriage have a higher divorce rate, but this has been disputed. Anyone got any solid data?

This is not because I'm considering getting married anytime soon. Ben wouldn't fall for that trick! (but if we want to have an army of robot children we should start on that soon) But, I'd like to be better informed about my chances of surviving marriage intact. I come from a family with almost no divorces so that bodes well, but I also think I might want to be in Obs/gyn (a surgical specialty) , although I'm also considering famly medicine. Will this play a role in my choice of residency? Probably not, although maybe subconsciously.

2 comments:

Nathan said...

I don't know that it's that high, but I've heard 10-20% higher for physicians than for the general population. And for the general population, it's about 50%, at least in America. There are a bunch of references at the bottom of this article:
http://scienceweek.com/2005/sw050826-4.htm
though I haven't checked them out.

Sara said...

I always heard that physicians had a LOWER divorce rate...no citation though