A study that suggested marriages are more likely to fail when the wife falls ill than has been retracted due to a coding error.
The article got a lot of media attention when it was published in March ¸. The research looked at 2,701 heterosexual marriages of people 51 and older, and found that when the wife falls seriously ill, there’s a 6 percent greater chance the couple will divorce than if she remains healthy. A husband’s illness, in contrast, had no impact.
Researchers corrected the code and found that the results stand only when wives develop heart problems, not other illnesses.
