If You’re a Bride with Cold Feet, Your Marriage May End in Divorce
When a bride-to-be has cold feet, she is typical told that’s something everybody goes through.
According to a new study, though, that’s not necessarily true.
And, furthermore, these feminine pre-material jitters more than double the chance the union will eventually end in divorce.
A paper published in the Journal of Family Psychology tracked 464 newlyweds for their first four years of marriage. The researchers found that 50 percent of the men and 40 percent of the women experienced cold feet before their big day. Among those women, the divorce rate after four years was 19 percent, whereas the rate for women who didn’t have cold was eight percent.
These results held up even after the researchers controlled for other factors that caused marriages to break up, such as having divorced parents or a neurotic personality.
Grooms who had doubts also had a higher rate of divorce. However the difference was slighter than it was with the brides and it was often tied to the groom having a neurotic personality. Because of this, the researchers weren’t able to similarly conclude that a groom’s cold feet results in higher divorce rates.
[Time]
