Divorce risk ‘linked to how much the husband likes his wife’s friends’

The Spice Girls sang, ‘If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends’ – and it turns out the pop group had a point where marriage is concerned.

Husbands who don’t like their wife’s friends – or feel that they interfere with their relationship – in the first year of a relationship face a greater risk of divorce further down the line.

‘Ours was one of the first studies to look at the effect of merging friend networks and how those might affect the marital relationship,’ study author Dr Katherine Fiori of Adelphi University in New York, told Live Science.

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Dr Fiori believes that this factor is of increasing importance – as couples now often meet online, rather than through shared friends.

It means that couples often have to get to grips with an entirely new group of people after meeting each other.

‘We are now having people who are coming from two very different sets of families and friends who are now trying to merge these networks,’ Dr Fiori said.

Oddly, the study found that merely disliking a spouse’s friends didn’t cause a higher rate of divorce in black couples – but across both black and white couples, the feeling that friends were ‘interfering’ led to a doubled risk of divorce, the Daily Mail reports.