New York, July 17: The seven-year itch may just be a marital myth after all - a new study has claimed that couples are most likely to part ways after a decade or more of marriage as they experience the 12-year itch.
Most of the divorcing couples have been together for more than 10 years and typically cite “growing apart” or “falling out of love” as the reason for heading to their separate ways.
The seven-year itch got its name from the Marilyn Monroe film of the same name, made back in the 1950s, and referred to the idea that cheating becomes impossible to resist after just seven years.
The current study, based on a survey of 90 big family law firms, revealed that most failed marriages fall apart around the 12-year mark.
“This rather dispels the age-old myth about marriages failing after seven years,” the New York Daily News quoted Sally Longworth of the Forensic and Investigation Services department at Grant Thornton, the British accountancy group that did the study, as saying.
According to the Daily Mail, the number of couples who divorce for these reasons has increased fourfold in the last two years, in the wake of ever-growing family financial strain.
Yet unfaithfulness is still the reason for more than 25 percent of all divorces.