YOUR genes won’t lead you to the altar, but they might summon you to the
divorce courts. A new study of twins suggests that genetic make-up has a strong
influence on whether or not your marriage will last—though not whether
you’ll get married in the first place.
Beth Jerskey, Michael Lyons and their colleagues at Boston University in
Massachusetts compared marriage and divorce rates in identical and non-identical
male twins. They gleaned their data from a registry of male twins who served in
the US military during the Vietnam war. In interviews in 1987—intended to
diagnose mental disorders—some…
