Beware! Divorce is contagious. It can spread through circles of friends as social networks tend to influence a person’s romantic and sexual practices, according to a study by American sociologists and psychologists.
Authors of the study, Rose McDermott (Brown University), James H. Fowler (University of California at San Diego) and Nicholas A. Christakis (Harvard University), argue that emotions aroused by one person’s divorce can be transferred like a virus, causing other close friends and relatives to divorce.
The researchers found that a divorce within immediate friends and family increases a person’s own chances of getting divorced by 75 per cent. “A person is 75 per cent more likely to be divorced if a person that they are directly connected to is divorced,” the study revealed.
So contagious is divorce that it can also affect relationships at least two degrees of separation away from the original couple who is separating. The researchers termed this effect as “divorce clustering.” The effect of divorce drops to 33 per cent at the two degrees of separation and disappears almost completely at three degrees of separation. In case of a sibling being divorced, people are 22 per cent more likely to get divorced compared to people who do not have a divorced sibling.