Breaking up turns out to be contagious

Remember North London's Primrose Hill set? Jude Law and Sadie Frost, Noel Gallagher and Meg Matthews, Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, Kate Moss and Pete Doherty. Celebrity couples with everything going for them, rich, beautiful and all good friends. And yet none of them are still together.

A study has come up with a possible explanation, suggesting the break-up of relationships within groups of friends is contagious - one couple within a social group divorces and their friends' relationships collapse around them like ninepins.

The researchers have called it "divorce clustering" and say that a split up between immediate friends increases your own chances of getting divorced by 75 per cent. The effect drops to 33 per cent if the divorce is between friends of a friend - two degrees of separation - then disappears almost completely at three degrees of separation.

It is not only the marital status of friends but also siblings and colleagues which has a significant effect on how long your own marriage might last. Breaking up will catch on among your friends, and the more divorcees you know, the higher your own chances of becoming one.

The research comes from sociologists and psychologists from three North American universities who have examined statistics from a group of individuals over a 32-year period.

They looked at the effect of divorce among peer groups on an individual's own risk of divorce and found a clear process of what the scientists called "social contagion".

The study was carried out by academics Rose McDermott at Brown University, James Fowler at the University of California and Nicholas Christakis at Harvard.

They used the Framingham Heart Study - a study of the population of a small town near Boston which was started in 1948 to investigate risk for heart disease but has since become a godsend for social research because of the wealth of information that continues to be collected from generation after generation.

The statistics also follow people who have left the town and suggest that a divorced friend or family member who lives hundreds of miles away may have as much influence on the risk of divorce as one who lives next door. It also found that the presence of children within a marriage did not in itself influence the likelihood of people getting divorced.

But each child a couple had further reduced the parents' susceptibility to being influenced by divorcing friends. The report suggested that the "normalising" of splits could be to blame.

It also found that "divorcees have denser social networks and are much more likely to remarry other divorcees". The study threw up further bad news for divorcees - they stand to lose 10 per cent of friends and are seen by some as a social threat.

The US report concluded that we need to recognise the far-reaching effects of a marital breakdown and treat it as a disease that will spread unless couples recognise the risk and talk openly about their friends' break-ups.

"Divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected," concludes the report.

- OBSERVER