Losing a job late in your career can do much more than disrupt your paycheck and retirement plan. New research examining marriages in midlife and later life found a striking connection between husbands’ employment status and what happened to those marriages two years later. After researchers accounted for a range of other factors, unemployed husbands had 138% higher odds of divorce at the next survey wave than husbands working full time. That doesn’t mean unemployment automatically leads to divorce, and it certainly doesn’t mean 138% of these couples divorced. Instead, the findings offer another reminder that unemployment and divorce can intersect with money, retirement planning and relationship stress at an age when couples may have considerably less time to financially recover.
