The more you spend on wedding, the more likely divorce - research

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"A diamond is forever," according to De Beers, but if a couple spends too much on their engagement ring then their marriage might not be.

A new study in the US has found that the more people spend on their weddings and engagement rings, the more likely they are to divorce.

Economic professors at Emory University carried out a study on over 3000 US men and women who had been married to a member of the opposite sex.

Professors Andrew M Francis and Hugo M Mialon found that men who spent between $2,000 and $4,000 on engagement rings were 1.3 times more likely to get divorced than men who spent between $500 and $2,000 on a ring.

For women, if a wedding cost over $20,000, they were 3.5 times more likely to divorce than women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000, the study claims.

Trying to cheat the system may not work for couples either; those who spent $500 or less on an engagement ring experienced higher rates of divorce, too.

The professors claim in their work that in 2014, wedding industry revenues are projected to exceed $50 billion in America. According to wedding site TheKnot, the average American wedding cost is $29,858.

"In 1959, Bride's recommended that couples set aside two months to prepare for their wedding and published a checklist with 22 tasks for them to complete. By the 1990s, the magazine recommended 12 months for wedding preparation and published a checklist with 44 tasks to complete," the professors said in their work.

They suggest that the high spend on weddings and rings and its relation to divorce rates could be due to the stress couples experience from the debt their wedding day can place them in.

But all is not lost; the study suggests that the key to marital bliss is to invite as many people to the big day as possible, and to take a honeymoon. It found that high wedding attendance and any kind of honeymoon, regardless of cost, was positively associated with the length of a marriage.

- Independent