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SALT LAKE CITY — A new study claims couples who share chores equally are more likely to see their marriage end in divorce.
A team out of Norway found that couples who divide housework equally were up to 50-percent more likely to divorce than couples in which the female did most of the housework.
"What we've seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn't necessarily contribute to contentment," Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study, told the Daily Telegraph.
The researchers looked at data on thousands of Norwegian adult couples to determine possible links between marriage, housework and happiness. One possibility raised for the cause of the higher divorce rate is that in couples who split the chores, women were more likely to be financially independent, making divorce more of an option.
Another view was that couples who split chores evenly may have a more "modern" view of marriage, making them less attached to the concept in principle.
The study has been criticized by some who point to recent research that has seen a different conclusion: men who contribute to household chores tend to be happier, and couples who share housework tend to be happier.
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Jen Doll, of the Atlantic, points to the lack of details reported on the study that could allow for comparison for American couples: variables such as sample size and socioeconomic breakdown of couples are missing from the report on the study.
Doll argues that the study may be correct in its observations about divorce rates and modern couples in general, but one does not necessarily cause the other.
"This study may mean nothing more and nothing less than that modern couples are more likely to divorce than they have been previously (this seems indisputable) and that modern couples are more likely to share chores in general (an idea backed by overall feelings about gender equality and studies that say that educated couples tend to marry later, are more likely to stay together," she wrote.
