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Listen up: Marriages are stronger if you hear each other.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Given that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, wouldn’t it be great if you could predict the outcome of yours? New research presented last week at a conference in Melbourne, Australia, finds that there are a few “risk factors” that can put some marriages on rocky footing. But don’t worry—knowing the secrets of strong marriages can offset the risks.

THE DETAILS: The study’s authors tracked 2,500 couples, either married or living together, for six years. Differing religious backgrounds had very little to do with the success of the relationships in this study, they found, but the factors that did seem to play a role in divorce were age, alcohol and cigarette use, strength of the couple’s parents’ marriages, finances, and previous marriages or relationships. When it came to age, couples in which the husband was either nine years older or two years younger than the wife were twice as likely to get divorced. If one person smoked more than the other, or if the wife drank more than her husband, the couples had between a 75 and 90 percent higher chance of divorcing than nonsmoking or nondrinking couples. Couples also had a 90 percent higher chance of divorcing if both people had been married before than couples in which both people were married for the first time. And divorce rates were twice as high when the woman in the couple wanted children (or more children) more so than the man.

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WHAT IT MEANS: Most of these risk factors are beyond your control, but they point to a broader challenge. “Anytime there are more differences in a couple, the more issues there are that they need to negotiate,” says Susan Heitler, PhD, author of The Power of Two: Secrets to a Strong and Loving Marriage (New Harbinger Publications, 1997) and a therapist with a private practice in Denver, CO. If you and your partner fall into one of the “at risk” groups above, don’t worry. It just means that you both will need to work a little more to hone your marital skills, she says.