
Do engineers really make better spouses? - marioluigi
http://www.divorcedebbie.com/engineers-divorce-rates-better-spouses/
======
zelos
"The article also purports that the higher level of communication inherent in
engineering jobs may be vital. A healthy communication in a marriage is vital
for its survival."

Yeah, us software engineers are renowned for our communication skills.

~~~
Fuxy
If I had to guess I would say it's the cause of 2 factors:

1.Certain professions attract certain personality types so you won't see a lot
of extroverted social people choosing engineering as their profession

Extroverts social as they are will always have more options and are less
likely to stick around if things get sour.

2.Financial stability means that even if the woman is unhappy in the
relationship she is more likely to stick around because it offers stability.

Why do you think all the girls always have a boyfriend even if their not that
into him.

Society tells them you're a looser if you don't have a boyfriend so they
always keep one around that doesn't mean their not willing to upgrade though
:)

Edit: I analogize for generalizing and saying engineers are all men it is
mostly true however as pointed out in the comments below not in all cases
however I cannot say anything about the reverse case.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
> 2.Financial stability means that even if the woman is unhappy in the
> relationship she is more likely to stick around because it offers stability.

There's so many assumptions made in that sentence...

1) Women care about money more than happiness

2) Engineers are awash with money

3) Women aren't engineers

4) Men are engineers.

~~~
balabaster
Also... there's a huge assumption that more money equals less financial
problems. One thing I've learned from the experience of my own finances is
that the times in my life when I've been flat broke, I had less financial
problems than in times when I've been flush with cash.

The higher your income, the higher your debt load - and this is caused by easy
access to credit, social conditioning to chasing the dream, climbing the
ladder, bigger house, more expensive cars - because you deserve it! You work
hard, you deserve to play hard too and who cares your income doesn't stretch
to that, here's a credit card, you can have as much money as you need... as
long as you can afford the minimum payment for the rest of your life. Society
conditions you towards using your financial abilities to get into more debt
than you can afford to repay and the illusion that because you have a high
income, you can afford to repay it every month in full... and then as long as
I pay most of it... and then at least keep up the minimum payments... and then
well, this one's not due until the end of the month, so I'll live on this card
and I'll pay the minimum payment and keep this card for emergencies... and
then an emergency crops up and hey, I'll just pay my hydro bill with this card
instead of paying cash and I'll use the cash to pay my credit card off and the
cycle escalates until you lose your house.

Just because you're an engineer and just because you have a high gross income
doesn't mean you have the financial wherewithal to maintain a stable financial
life.

So yes, none of the assumptions here stand up to scrutiny.

~~~
Fuxy
I don't have a credit card for this exact reason. I get at least 5 invitations
by mail every week but i don't really need it.

Spend the money you have not the money you can get.

~~~
dcherman
If you treat a credit card the same as cash, then there is literally no
difference in how much you should be spending, but you need the discipline to
actually do that.

There are a number of benefits to using credit cards that cash doesn't have:

1\. Build a credit score

2\. Fraud protection

3\. Related to 2, but if I lose my card it's not a huge deal, cancel it and
get a new one. If I lose 300$ cash, it's just gone.

4\. Rewards! ( 1-3% back on 20K spending per year is a few hundred bucks )

5\. Extended Warranties. Often times, you can get an extra year or more on
warranties through your credit cards. That's why I put my new kitchen
appliances on my Amex.

6\. Free loans! I re-did my kitchen last year at about a 10K cost. Although I
had the cash to do so, I instead signed up for a new card with 18 month 0%
interest. That gave me another year and a half of saving before paying that
off, so it's less of a hit to my balance at once. _IMPORTANT_ I would not have
done this if I did not have the cash to pay this off at any point in time.

It's really, really simple too - just pay off your statement balance in full
each month and you'll never pay interest. I can count on one hand both how
many times I've paid interest, and how much I've paid in interest. All of them
were due to my own screw ups with scheduling payments ( off by a day - oops!
), however I've benefited far more from the cards than I've ever paid out. In
most of those cases, the banks waived the fees anyway since there was a track
record of 3-5+ years of never missing a payment, always paying in full.

~~~
balabaster
There's a built in assumption here that you need credit... if you don't need
credit then all this is moot. Everyone's so keen to be part of the system that
they never stop to wonder what they're chasing... there are justifications and
rationalizing and whatever else it takes to belong. None of it's necessary.
The 1-3% cash back and the air miles and the fraud protection and all these
other goodies they promise you are bribery to use their card so that they can
get the scale they need to make the system profitable for them. They sell your
information, aggregate it to marketing companies, it's a means to track your
every purchase electronically etc. etc.

If you'd paid cash you could have got a better deal from suppliers by
negotiating cash discounts and nobody would be aggregating your information or
tracking your purchases to target advertising to try to further their way into
your wallet. If you'd paid the $10K up front, which you had the cash to do so,
what did you do with that $10K? Did it just sit in your bank giving you an
illusion of a bank balance or did you invest it to make some return to justify
putting it on credit and putting off until tomorrow what you could have paid
for today? You purchased this kitchen effectively putting a lien on that
money, it's no longer yours... but having it in your account still gives you
the illusion that it is. It only takes something unexpected happening and that
money that's not yours [which is still in your account] is easy to dip into
for an emergency with the expectation that you'll pay back into it another day
when you can afford that - a day that never comes, until that kitchen you've
been enjoying for the last 18 months and now can't live without needs paying
for...

It's ridiculously easy to get sucked into the trap of cycling one debt after
another and then you're stuck with your only options being: Sell everything
you own to pay it off, claim bankruptcy and start again from scratch or strive
for a higher paying job, putting yourself under extra stress... and for what?
The ability to raise your debt load. It's not really much surprise, the entire
capitalist economy is built on debt, without it, there would be no economy.
The U.S. currency is loaned (at interest) by the Fed to the U.S. Government,
so debt goes right to the very foundation of the entire economy. So it's an
ever perpetuating cycle.

There are rationalizations on both sides of the fence. For the record, I'm not
dead against credit, I'm just saying that for every rationalization that can
be offered to use credit, there are equally many reasons to avoid it.

~~~
dcherman
You _do_ need credit though unless you never intend on financing a car or
purchasing a house with a mortgage.

While it may be entirely feasible to get along your entire life without
financing a car by either purchasing used cars or inexpensive new ones, for
99% of people ( including myself ), it's extraordinarily difficult to purchase
a home in a reasonable amount of time ( 10-15+ years saving required for a
barebones house most likely ).

You could argue that prices are like this due to the easy availability of
credit ( see 2008 or the problems with student loans/college prices ), but
that doesn't change the reality that some things are extremely expensive and
for nearly all people will require some type of loan. At that point, not
having a good credit score will cost you dearly in much higher interest rates.

As for my kitchen, the reason you gave it exactly the reason that I did it.
Although I did net an additional 100$ or so in interest over the course of the
year as well due to it being in my savings account ( yay!...kinda? ), the
primary reason was in the event of an emergency. Any emergency that would
require an additional $10,000 is likely to be medical, family, or loss of job
related. Since I have insurance, that means that the most likely scenario is
family or job related; in either instance, the availability of cash to help a
member of my family out or pay my mortgage for 6 months would be more
important to me than the costs associated with financing that card for a
period of time. In addition, I would still be able to pay the card off by
selling a bit of stock, however I wanted the additional liquidity by having
cash on hand. I don't make decisions like that lightly; all of those scenarios
were considered before I decided to go the 0% card route.

~~~
balabaster
Having financed my last 6 cars - all bar one of them from new and having made
a vehicle payment every month of my adult life, I've learned that financing
new vehicles is a fools errand. What you get in perceived reliability (and it
frequently is only perceived), you lose in depreciation the minute it gets
driven off the lot. When I've paid the final payment on my vehicle this month,
I will continue paying that same amount into an account until this vehicle
dies or has a repair bill beyond what it would cost me to replace it. I
predict (hopefully accurately) that if I continue to look after it well, I
should have plenty enough money in the bank to purchase my next (nearly-new-
but-used-and-still-has-warranty) vehicle outright with someone else having
taken the depreciation hit instead of me. Admittedly, I got to where I did now
with credit, so my picture isn't black and white. I could have continued to
use my bike for a few years, putting aside the money for a vehicle until I had
enough to pay outright, I didn't - but that was the impatience of youth. If
I'd had no/bad credit at the time, I'm sure being who I am, I would have found
another way.

As for a house, it definitely doesn't take 10-15 years if you think outside
the box cultured by our society.

------
Disruptive_Dave
I'm reminded of a scene from Scrubs where Turk tells JD: "I love how kids of
divorced parents swear they have the market cornered on family
dysfunction...". Point being - I don't view "not divorced" as a significant
metric for a successful / happy marriage.

~~~
RankingMember
Louis CK has a good bit about this too:

"Divorce is always good news. I know that sounds weird, but it's true because
no good marriage has ever ended in divorce. That would be sad. If two people
were married and ... they just had a great thing and then they got divorced,
that would be really sad. But that has happened zero times."

~~~
mduerksen
He is wrong about this one.

The quality of marriage is neither binary nor one-dimensional, it varies over
time, and most importantly, _can be influenced_ for the better or worse.

Its graph over time is also also not monotonic decreasing.

I fear that some marriages get divorced at a local minimum.

------
cauterized
Divorce rates are also linked to income. Engineering is typically a more
stable and better paying career than something like dance (given as the
counterexample in the article). How much of the difference in divorce rates is
attributable to that?

~~~
drpgq
I wonder if a small part of the dancer/bartender vs engineer situation is that
engineers (statistically usually male) often are working mostly with other
men. My sister is married to a ballet dancer (who just retired to start
studying to become a nurse) and he obviously was in pretty close contact with
the opposite sex.

~~~
khill
If that was the main factor, the divorce rate for law enforcement would likely
be lower as well.

~~~
Ensorceled
Is law enforcement on the engineering side of the comparison that was just
made or the bartender/dancer side?

Law enforcement has it's own issues that are quite independent of most other
occupations.

------
bitL
I think the main reason is the unpleasant fact that desirable women under 30
like to have fun with attractive men (men that create a lot of interest
amongst younger women and can exchange them frequently), which from 90%
excludes all engineers. Once the age issues hit women, they look for reliable
and stable partners that would consider them a win at their age, for which
engineers are prime candidates. Sorry for being cynical, as a photographer I
handle a lot of desirable women and talk to them about what is important to
them at various ages, and as an engineer can observe this basic dynamics -
i.e. a no-longer super attractive woman rejected by most desirable men because
her attractiveness falters hooks an aging engineer that had a crush on her
while she was in her prime, and stays with him due to a lack of better options
and desire for some stability, while he is happy beyond measure to get such a
(formerly) attractive spouse.

------
3JPLW
Man, they took the least-informative numbers from that article. Much more
interesting is the difference from their predicted divorce rate (which
corrects for race, gender, and income, but not age, unfortunately).

Quite a few of the engineering professions have 50-60% the divorce rate of the
national average, but after accounting for the above three covariances it's
not quite as striking (putting them at 60-90% of expected). Agricultural
engineers are still way down at 12% of expected, but they don't list the N for
non-LE occupations.

Here's the actual article, but it's behind a pay wall.
[http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11896-009-9057-8](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11896-009-9057-8)

Google scholar has a link to a publicly accessible version: [http://faculty-
course.insead.edu/popescu/UDJCore/2010/handou...](http://faculty-
course.insead.edu/popescu/UDJCore/2010/handouts/Divorce%20Rates.pdf)

------
jay-saint
Have you walked into the average engineering classroom? I remember my EE class
had 90% male population. We were not exactly the coolest or most attractive
looking group of guys. I think being grateful to finally meet someone that
likes us plays a little role.

More seriously, people with engineering backgrounds tend to be analytic and
may have made more logical choices prior to marriage, that result in longer
lasting relationships. I think that that problem solving mentality could also
contribute.

~~~
balabaster
I think this may be a narrow view of humanity...

Everyone's an engineer in one way or another - that's just who we are as
people. Just because the stereotype tends towards "engineers" (traditional
meaning) being into mechanics, logic, programming, structures etc. doesn't
mean that everything can't be viewed this way.

The popular guys at school and politicians are social engineers. Footballers
look to solve the problem of helping their team to win. Dancers and bartenders
look to solve the problem of how to get people to spend/tip the highest amount
of money they can. We look to manipulate logic to get machines to do what we
want. Others may look to manipulate emotions and perspectives to get people to
do what they want - i.e. spend more money, help them earn more commission.
It's all engineering in one way or another.

So to assume that we make more logical choices prior to marriage that result
in longer lasting relationships might be a _touch_ narcissistic. We are no
different than anyone else, it's just that we're machine nerds. Other people
are people nerds, football nerds, modelling nerds, advertising nerds, music
nerds, history nerds, science nerds, food nerds etc. They all have problems
they're trying to solve and they all use their problem solving and logical
skills to solve them, everyone a nerd in one way or another.

To typecast "engineers" (reading between the lines) as desperate does us a
disservice. Everyone suffers from self image problems in one way or another -
you can thank the media for that courtesy of beauty magazines, wrinkle cream,
modeling mags, diet mags, a constant barrage of advertising telling you how to
solve body problems and look better to get that hotter partner who also
suffers from poor self image problems. You may suffer from poor self image of
your perception of your lacking social skills (you really just never had the
social training for how to talk with people) but want a hot model type. She
may have poor body image because the beauty magazines make her feel ugly and
you're all she can get blah blah blah. It's all quite nauseating really.

We all live in this Venn diagram of people we're attracted to that would make
good life partners. The intersection of which is where we'll find long term
relationship satisfaction (I'll refrain from calling that happiness, because
the relationship isn't the whole picture of happiness)... but nobody knows
where the intersection is and that's the joy of life. When you're not true to
your Venn diagram, it's painful. When you are and you find someone who
intersects with yours in the right way, it's amazing.

~~~
dudifordMann
Just to add to this comment: We do not function in isolation as a single
typecast. We are all dynamic people. The football players or "popular people"
could also be software engineers.

Anecdotally, one of the most athletic people I knew in school ended up double
majoring with a 4.0 in mechanical and chemical engineering. I never went to a
school where there were over-the-top movie quality cliques. Our athletes were
also our 4.0's, who where also our popular kids, who were also our geeks. So
be who you want.

~~~
balabaster
Exactly... If I have problems with my car, I take it to a mechanic. He's an
engine nerd... something at which I suck, he's awesome at it. If I have legal
problems, I go to a lawyer. He's a legal nerd... again, something at which I
suck. If they need software written, [or more likely, their computers fixed,
again. Don't get me started] they'd most likely both come to me. They might
both be awesome photographers and play on the same hockey team, have largely
the same peer group and just be fascinated by different things. They may have
different conditioning due to their family background. One's father might own
a car shop, the other's mother might be a judge. They might have grown up as
neighbours, gone to the same school and been in all the same classes together.
One may just have had a large exposure to the way law works growing up and one
may just have had more of an interest in hanging out with Dad in the garage
tinkering with engines because his Dad was a race car mechanic. The mechanic's
mom may have taught both of them to play piano and they may both be concert
grade music nerds. The nuances are endless.

------
nashashmi
I find that male engineers are more difficult to handle by their wives, but if
they can be handled, the engineer will hardly ever switch marriages or give up
on the one thing that he's got that actually works.

There is also stability of income and quality of life that comes into play.
When there is stability in the professional field, an engineer has more time
to dedicate to his family. That is a gigantic luxury in itself.

~~~
LordKano
_I find that male engineers are more difficult to handle by their wives_

In general, I have found that intelligent men are more difficult for women to
manipulate.

Not to say that it doesn't happen or that it's not possible, merely that it's
more difficult and when it does happen, it tends to be less effective.

~~~
VLM
Don't forget the valuable engineering skill of managing your manager, and I
think nobody is better at that than engineers. She thinks she's in charge and
she thinks she's ordering me to do her bidding, but methodically managed
reality makes things somewhat more complicated.

------
marknutter
I believe Chris Rock said it best: "A man's only faithful as his options".
Engineering is a male dominated field so the opportunity to meet someone you
might want to cheat with is far lower than for bartenders or dance
instructors. Case close, as far as I'm concerned, let's not let this go to our
heads.

------
JackFr
Without having read the original study, it would be worthwhile to see if the
there was any attempt to normalize by education level, income and age. It's
likely that these are more salient factors and profession is acting as a proxy
for these.

~~~
gvb
What is interesting is the last three "engineers" in the list are not
engineers-by-education ("white collar") type engineers, they are engineers-by-
trade ("blue collar"). The "engineers by trade" typically have a lower
education level and probably lower income level.

Locomotive engineers and operators 15.77

Stationary engineers and boiler operators 16.99

Operating engineers and other construction equipment operators 18.97

The "blue collar" engineers have a substantially higher divorce rate than most
of the "white collar" engineering professions, but the transition by
percentages compared to the those preceding them in the list was a lot
smoother than I expected.

~~~
VLM
Some google results: Average CivEng $61K (and average is going to be higher
than median), median locomotive engineer $65K.

The days of blue collar folks making less than white collar folks as a class
has been dead for a couple generations, but the belief lives on...

------
noir_lord
There is also the issue of accessibility to other partners, lots of divorce is
the result of infidelity.

Engineering has primarily been a male dominated environment and you work
alongside other men.

Dancers and Bar Tenders (as mentioned in the overview) not so much.

------
jldugger
Probably a linked variable or two here. Thinking aloud:

1\. Higher income. Like, substantially higher income. 2\. Later marriage.
People don't tend to get married in college, and I expect to find that people
who get married early have higher divorce rates than average.

------
ckozlowski
If you look at the Myers-Briggs personality types listed at TypeLogic, you'll
see for the INTJ type (most often associated with engineering types) as being
said to often "Work at" a relationship.

This is, I know, a weak argument at best, but I would toss out as something to
ponder that perhaps there's a higher incidence of analytic types to dissect
and improve their relationship.

...or simply inclined to remain with the status quo. You decide.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
If you look at the Zodiac, most engineers are earth signs, and you know how
hard it is to get along with them.

~~~
ckozlowski
I've heard of a lot of the criticism about the MBTI as well, and I agree with
a majority of it. I'd thought my disclaimer sufficed enough to ward off the
down votes.

In any case, it was thrown out there to see what sticks. "What makes a
relationship work" is hard to measure at best. But I have to think, just as
the article makes some generalized assumptions from some rough figures, there
might be a correlation to other rough observations, even if they don't hold up
to scientific levels of scrutiny.

tl;dr: I don't think any of what's being discussed is able to be isolated as a
defining factor of what makes marriage successful. But it's interesting to
speculate.

------
jmadsen
We're like Forestt Gump - dull, but dependable :-)

------
wolfgke
Perhaps the reason is that only those people who really love the "engineer
type of person" will voluntarily marry engineers. ;-)

------
jkot
There is age bias. Engineer often change profession once he gets older.

~~~
dagw
Really? My family is full of 50+ year old engineers and I can't think of any
engineers that I know that changed careers as they got older. Sure some of
them may have taken on more management responsibilities as they got older, but
non of them left engineering.

~~~
imgabe
If you're thinking of only the 50+ engineers you know, of course those ones
haven't changed careers. You'd have to think of some 50+ year old actors or
chefs you know and find out if they used to be engineers.

~~~
dagw
Fair point. Let me rephrase. Of everybody I know how's done a late career
switch, engineers are extremely underrepresented, to the point I can't think
of any. The closet I can come up with is a surveyor, which I suppose counts an
engineer in some places.

The most common educational backgrounds to lead to a later life career switch
in my limited observation is either teaching or banking/finance.

------
kazinator
This report looks like someone did a "grep" for the word "engineer".

It is not particularly informative to know that boiler operators and
construction operators have higher divorce rates than aerospace engineers.

------
aperture
From a quick google search, a link to the study:
[http://www.sagepub.com/bartol3e/study/articles/Aamodt.pdf](http://www.sagepub.com/bartol3e/study/articles/Aamodt.pdf)

And what looks to be a slideshow presentation on the matter:
[http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Research%20-%20Forensic/SPCP%...](http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Research%20-%20Forensic/SPCP%202008%20-%20McCoy%20&%20Aamodt%20-%20Divorce%20Rates.pdf)

------
cafard
Very odd. The list concludes with three skilled trades that share the name
engineer, but don't have the same requirements for education and certification
as (say) civil or electrical engineering. Now, I expect that the insurance
companies see to it that all of those working as locomotive engineers have
more rigorous training than many of us working as software engineers, and the
same may be true for some operating engineers. Still, the list suggests a
certain carelessness.

------
anonymous8616
My own completely made up supposition:

Engineers are more likely to take a pragmatic approach instead of a
sentimental "Oh no! He/She doesn't have exactly the same taste in
vacations/home decor/friends/whatever, we must not be soulmates after all!"

------
ollysb
I suspect that engineers also tend to spend a lot less of their time meeting
members of the opposite sex.

------
andrewstuart2
Seems pretty obvious to me that the amount of contact with the opposite gender
plays a huge part. Since most married couples are heterosexual and Engineering
is still dominated by men, so contact of any kind is more rare.

On the other hand, dancers and choreographers are very likely to be dancing or
choreographing with someone other than their spouse, at a very close physical
distance to very fit partners who are nearly always the opposite gender.
Jealousy and infidelity probably both play a part there. Same goes for
bartenders -- the chances somebody comes to my engineering firm looking for a
hot date? Not much, but a bar? That's a little more likely.

And lastly, I had to chuckle at agricultural engineers. All I can picture is a
guy designing a combine, alone, in the middle of a cornfield. Good luck
meeting someone ;-)

~~~
cozuya
Its a little ironic that the group of people who laugh at "designing a GUI in
visual basic to track the killer's IP address" apparently thinks that an
agricultural engineer sits in the middle of a cornfield with a bunch of charts
on an easel sketching out what piston goes into what shaft... as opposed to,
you know, an office.

~~~
andrewstuart2
That was just a bit of comedy at the end. I don't actually think that
agricultural engineers are likely to have a desk in the middle of a corn
field. :-)

------
QuadDamaged
I am an engineer. I used to be married to a dancer.

#FML

------
damnmachine
Well I suppose I'm an outlier; software engineer with 100% divorce rate so
far. :-p

------
lolipop12
Engineers have engineering degrees. Programming != engineering. Just like MCSE
!= engineer. Just like 'helpdesk engineer' != engineer.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, the list does include "computer software engineers."

