No matter how much you love each other, your marriage could be doomed to failure by such mundane factors as your age, previous relationships, parents or even the nasty habit of smoking, reports the Australian Associated Press of a study titled "What's Love Got to Do With It?"

Led by Rebecca Kippen and Bruce Chapman from The Australian National University and Peng Yu from Australia's Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the team tracked nearly 2,500 married and cohabiting couples from 2001 to 2007 and identified which factors are most likely to sever relationships.

The top eight reasons why your marriage might fail:

1. When a man is nine or more years older than his wife, they are twice as likely to get divorced, compared with couples who are closer in age.

2. Men who marry before age 25 are twice as likely to get divorced than men who marry at an older age.

3. Twenty percent of couples who have children before they marry--either from the same relationship or a previous relationship--divorce or separate, compared to just nine percent of couples who wait to have children until after they are married. The number of children a couple have after they are married does not affect the rate of divorce.

4. Couples are far more likely to divorce if the woman wants to have children much more than does her partner.

5. Sixteen percent of couples whose parents ever separated or divorced, experience marital separation themselves, compared with 10 percent of those whose parents did not separate or divorce.

6. When one of the partners is in his or her second or third marriage, the couple is 90 percent more likely to separate or divorce than couples who are both in their first marriage.

7. Sixteen percent of couples who identified themselves as poor or where the husband was unemployed, ended up separating or divorcing, compared with only nine percent of couples who reported healthy finances. The wife's employment status did not affect the stability of the marriage.

8. When one--but not the other--partner smokes, the marriage is far more likely to end in failure than for couples where both or neither partner smokes.

--From the Editors at Netscape