The jobs most likely to ruin your marriage

If your spouse helps people or touches them for a living, be careful: you may be divorced. The helping professions and hospitality workers have some of the highest divorce rates in the country, according to a comparison of divorce rates between occupations.

Conventional wisdom is that police officers have high divorce rates. But a year-ago analysis of the top 15 jobs with the highest divorce rate that recently circulated the Internet doesn’t even include police officers among the worst offenders. Based on data from the 2000 US Census, law enforcement workers were found to have a lower divorce rate than the general population.

Before I try to explain why some of these jobs may have high divorce rates, here are the top 15 professions and their divorce rates:

• Dancing: 43%
• Bartender: 38%
• Masseur: 38%
• Game cage: 34%
• Extrusion machine operator: 32%
• Games: 31%
• Factory: 29%
• Telephone operator: 29%
• Nursing: 28%
• Entertainers, sports: 28%
• Attrition: 28%
• Telemarketer: 28%
• Waiter: 27%
• Roofer: 26%
• Maid: 26%

The national divorce rate in 2009 was 10 percent. It’s hard to know if previous jobs are prone to more divorces or if more unstable people are drawn to those professions. Professional dancers, athletes, and entertainers, for example, have more opportunities to cheat on their spouses because they often work outside the home and are surrounded by adoring fans. At least that’s Tiger Woods’ explanation.

Help professionals, such as massage therapists and nurses, have a great deal of stress and work long hours, spending less time with their families. Hospitality workers such as waiters, maids, doormen, and gaming workers also work irregular hours at highly stressful jobs and come into contact with people on vacation who may be feeling a bit aroused and have time and money for a date at the hotel. worked. .

Regardless of profession, divorces are highest among jobs where workers face a lot of stress and temptation, said Debra Opri, a divorce attorney in Beverly Hills, California. Those temptations include other women, gambling and alcohol, Opri said.

Jobs that require extensive travel, odd hours and a lot of stress can lead to divorce because the worker is too far away from their spouse and doesn’t know how to deal with stress away from home, said Ike Vanden Eykel, a Dallas divorcée. lawyer for 37 years, in a telephone interview with AOL Jobs.

Working odd hours and then spending more time with co-workers instead of a spouse isn’t the only thing that can lead to divorce, Vanden Eykel said. “One of the biggest causes of divorce is financial pressure,” he said.

“When you can’t make ends meet, that adds economic pressure that you can’t avoid,” he said, adding that even highly paid CEOs who feel pressure at work can have high divorce rates.

Night work can also lead to higher divorce rates, Richard Fitzgibbons, director of the Institute for Marital Healing, told the Catholic News Agency website. “Those who work nights are at a distinct disadvantage,” Fitzgibbons said, “because the marital friendship usually suffers, with subsequent significant loneliness.”

Some of these jobs also don’t pay well, which can put more stress on the marriage. Better-educated workers tend to have higher-paying jobs, which can put less stress on marriages.