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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

That's because financial problems are the main reason for divorce. Dual engineering incomes should not have those problems.

Happily married to another engineer for 15 years. Now engineers also like to argue, so put two of them in the same household and see what happens. We do argue about finances, but it's me not wanting to spend money.

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I think it's also possible that engineering-minded people choose their partners based on more pragmatic reasons, tend to think more about the long term. In opposition to choosing someone primarily based on physical attraction and sexual compatibility, or some mystical belief in love.

IMO, engineers less likely to do things the average couple might do, such as moving in together after a month, planning marriage six months in, and having a baby one year in, they're more likely to be patient and make more careful choices.

That's what I was wondering. Could someone measure some kind of 'pickiness' measure to determine if bartenders just tend to get married fast where engineers tend to have a long courtship (or some other factor)?

While lack of money making problems worse is certainly an issue I wonder what (if anything) this says about how people choose partners in addition to how things work out.

Marrying someone you aren't particularly attracted to or in love with sounds like a recipe for divorce to me.

I used to think that but it turns out that arranged marriages are quite successful: http://www.statisticbrain.com/arranged-marriage-statistics/

Obvious it's not as simple as comparing the divorce rate of love vs arranged marriages, cultural factors play a huge part but from what I've seen in India the fact that they're committed to making it work seems to make for happy couples.

perhaps the type of person that would agree to an arranged marriage is also the type not to object or try and break such a public contract/agreement.

I would think it would be just the opposite or least if there were financial incentive ok. You fall in and out of love all the time, or at least I do.

Parent comment was suggesting less attention given to physical attraction and more to other forms of attraction (personality, intelligence, SES, etc.), not that all forms of attraction were ignored.

Most people consider love what is better described as lust: a psychological attraction that lasts for about 2 years. If this is all you have to base a relationship on, then after 2 years the feeling wears off and the whole relationship is done.

By contrast, if your relationship is based on just about anything else, whatever those other things are are not as likely to change and so the basis of the relationship doesn't change either.

"Particularly" is ill defined here -- as is "attraction." Some aspects of attraction will go away over time (most obviously looks), others vary from time to time. What matters is the ability to love the partner even when you don't like them at a specific moment in time -- because those moments aren't the eternity.

Yeah, let's see an analysis which controls for income.

There's another graph that shows that divorce rate and average occupational income are linearly correlated, with higher income yielding lower divorce rates. This is all pretty well known, AFAIK.

The link above has a graph showing the industries by medium income. There's a pretty clear correlation, with some outlier professions.

(We've updated the submission title from “Engineering couples have one of the lowest divorce rates” to that of the article.)

Do you have a citation for this? Purely to sate curiosity.

Not precisely what you asked for, but financial disagreements strongly predict divorce: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2012....

Thank you!

Nope, just what my mother told me years ago, though a quick google search shows it's pretty high. I'd say it's the highest since "general incompatibility" can mean many things.

I can say that in my 20+ years in engineering, none of my colleagues are divorced. All the typical infidelity gossip is from the other side of the business; purchasing, program management, etc.

It was reported that in the lead up to the first iPhone release the divorce rate among those involved was fairly high. And I'm guessing game engineers probably don't do so well either.

Game industry has huge turnaround 5 years max - people tend to try it and the get out fast. Hopefully they dont divorce that fast. I would also guess most to be young and not married in the first place.

Interesting. Insofar as "infidelity gossip" is concerned, do you believe/perceive that the reason it comes "from the other side of the business" is because of some combination of traits that makes it more likely in those areas (or, inversely, that engineers lack some combination of traits that leads to a reduction in infidelity gossip)?

The infidelity or just the gossip about it? I can't say for sure, but I think the workload required (in school) for an "engineering major" vs. "business major" has something to do with it. If college shapes you, that's definitely the mold. The party'er types are weeded out. Could also be long term decision making vs short term, impulsive vs delayed gratification. Engineering is mostly long term thinking about what can go wrong.

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