Clergymen and dentists marry for keeps

True love may be the key to a long and happy marriage – but being a dentist or an agricultural engineer helps, too, according to new research. A paper that correlates occupations with divorce and separation rates, to be published this week in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, reveals that dancers and choreographers, bartenders, massage therapists and telephone operators are most likely to split up. Those looking for a life of fidelity and loyalty, however, should marry agricultural engineers, optometrists, dentists, members of the clergy and podiatrists.

Dr Michael Aamodt, an industrial psychologist and professor of Industrial and Organisational Psychology at Radford University in Virginia, has invented a formula to work out the likelihood of success for a marriage, based on the percentage of people in 449 occupations who had been in a marital relationship, but were no longer with their spouses.

"To compute the divorce rate for each occupation, we used the following formula: (separated + divorced) divided by (total population - never married). This formula yielded the percentage of people in each occupation that had been in a marital relationship, but were no longer with their spouse," he said.



Using census information, Aamodt rated professions and trades according to their likelihood of achieving a successful marriage. "I looked at the divorce rate for each given occupation after controlling for gender, race, age and income characteristics," said Aamodt. "By controlling for demographic variables that might be related to divorce rates, we also obtained race, gender, age and income information for each occupation."

Aamodt initially also rated each occupation according to three sources of occupational stress: shift work, overtime and weekend work. But, he said, none of the variables made a significant difference. His study found that chefs and mathematicians shared a 20% chance of getting divorced or separated. Journalists and urban planners had a 17.54% chance, while librarians, dietitians and fitness instructors had a 16.89% chance.

Travel agents, writers and police shared a 15-16% chance of divorce, slightly above firefighters and teachers. At 12.48% chance of divorce, judges and magistrates were slightly less likely to succeed than vets and funeral directors.