Divorce is not easy on any one who is involved.  There are various studies that show the effects that divorce has on women and children.  Some women may become sad from being out of a relationship while others find a particular freedom from being out of a bad situation.  Children can be ever more devastated by a divorce.  But the effect on men was revealed in a recent study.

The study is called “The Influence of Divorce on Men’s Health” published in the Journal of Men’s Health. It was a joint study by Dr. W. David Robinson of Utah State University and Dr. Daniel S. Felix of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.   They connected the trauma of divorce with various physical ailments such as heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure.

There are also emotional reasons why divorce is difficult on men.  After being a spouse for a while, it becomes your identity, either due to their thoughts about marriage or society’s constructs.  Once a decision is made that ruins that role, it can be more difficult to define that former purpose.  This can lead to depression without finding a new responsibility or task.

The results of a new study indicate that divorce just may be contagious; when you're around divorcing couples, you're more likely to do the same.

The study, conducted by researchers from Brown University, Harvard University and University of California in San Diego, concluded that having a close friend or relative who is divorced can increase the chancefor a person’s own marriage breakup by 75 percent. The study also found that even knowing acquaintances that are divorced raises the risk of breakup by 33 percent.

The study was headed by Dr. Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University. According to McDermott, divorce is what she calls a “social contagion” – the news of someone’s divorce spreads quickly among family, friends, work colleagues and other social networks people have.

Divorce is one of the most difficult times that a person can go through. Though divorce is extremely common—according to the Center for Disease Control, the number of divorces and annulments has continued to increase since 2009, after slowing slightly during the Great Recession—some feel a stigma upon marital dissolution. Often, there are complicated matters to deal with, such as child custody or joint parenting. “Shared physical custody is increasingly common in divorce courts across the nation,” Parenting magazine reports. Though this can be good for children of divorce, it can be all the more difficult for divorcing parents.