> Karraker and her co-author did the analysis again, and found the results stand only when wives develop heart problems, not other illnesses.<p>This is p-hacking after-the-fact, right? Seems like the classic example: The broader hypothesis doesn’t hold, but if you look for ways to slice and dice the data you’re likely to find a (spurious?) correlation eventually.
> What we find in the corrected analysis is we still see evidence that when wives become sick marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce, whereas we don’t see any relationship between divorce and husbands’ illness. We see this in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.<p>I take issue with this framing. Starting with saying that when women get sick, risk of divorce elevates, immediately followed by saying this happens only in one type of sickness is still very misleading. The entire first sentence is misrepresenting the actual findings.
Twenty five year marriage here. Her mental health issues started a few years in and were manageable. She did short term institutionalization later on. The end times were lots of hunkering down. She eventually left (but I still helped where I could).<p>Me not ending the marriage sooner - this was reasonably questioned. Some of that was me being a guy.
The article was published in 2015 and redacted in the same year. So for context, peer review limited the damage. However the article did enter the clickbait media.
Why might the correlation exist for heart disease but not other illnesses? Obesity comes to mind, many men become unsatisfied with their relationship when their wife sits at home getting fat. If it's not that (did they control for obesity?), I can't think of a plausible reason for this pattern of correlations so maybe the whole thing is bullshit.
>We see this in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.<p>The one divorce I can think of in my extended family came from the onset of heart problems. Properly speaking, it was the abortion she had that caused the divorce, not the fact that she would have died otherwise.