STUDY: The More Siblings You Have, the Lower Your Chances of Divorce

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Earlier this week, Ohio State University declared that the more siblings you have, the lesser the risk that one day you will get divorced.

Wait, what? Yep, researchers there found, after collecting data from about 57,000 people from 1972 to 2012, that apparently, each sibling a person has reduces the likelihood that they will get divorced by 2 percent. (After seven siblings, though, there is no discernible additional positive effect, they say. Kinda like how they also say that any SPF above 45 is nonsense.)

The article does mention this disclaimer:

• Although the study found a link between having more siblings and lower odds of divorce, it didn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

Which means that the scientists were left to subjectively interpret what the reasons might be that people with more siblings get divorced less often. And here is where, as an only child, I could not help but chuckle/roll my eyes just a bit at these gems:

• “We expected that if you had any siblings at all, that would give you the experience with personal relationships that would help you in marriage.”
• “Growing up in a family with siblings, you develop a set of skills for negotiating both negative and positive interactions.”
• “You have to consider other people’s points of view and learn how to talk through problems. The more siblings you have, the more opportunities you have to practice those skills.”

Not that those above statements aren’t believable or true—they totally are!—it’s just that you can’t help but also infer that the other side of the statement is ” … more so than/better than/as opposed to people with no siblings.”

Which makes me feel like I need to say, on behalf of only children everywhere, that hard as it may be to believe, we do, somehow, through the dark and lonely tundra of our lives, manage to have personal relationships and develop social skills and have all kinds of interactions and consider other people’s points of view and learn how to talk through problems and generally use social skills quite a bit. We can not get divorced, too.

But that said, go people with siblings! Enjoy your happily-ever-afters!

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