Avoid these dates for your wedding to reduce odds of divorce: study

If you’re newly engaged and choosing a wedding date, there are certain popular ones you might want to avoid. Even if you think they’ll help you remember your wedding anniversary.

Couples who tie the knot on “gimicky” dates like Valentine’s Day — or numerically special dates, like 9/9/99 or 1/2/03,  perceived to be lucky or auspicious — are 18 to 36 per cent more likely to divorce than those who get married on “ordinary” dates.

Economists at the University of Melbourne studied Dutch marriage and divorce registries from between 1999 to 2013 to come up with the findings, which they claim are the first of their kind. They were detailed in their report titled, “Not Your Lucky Day: Romantically and Numerically Special Wedding Date Divorce Risks.”

What’s in a number?

The researchers believe those who wed on “ordinary” dates are possibly more influenced by their relationship compatibility and quality. Those drawn to “special” dates, on the other hand, might rely too heavily on external motivations.

“For some couples, considerations of when to marry, specifically the opportunity to hold a wedding on a romantically or numerically special date, may influence the decision of whether to marry,” the report reads. “The normative implication is that decisions about ‘whether’ should precede those of ‘when.'”

READ MORE: 5 of the biggest relationship mistakes and how to fix them

The higher divorce risks for this group could also be attributed to a few other patterns the study noticed:

• Spouses who married on special dates were less alike, in terms of education and ages, than spouses who married on ordinary dates.
• People who got married on special dates were more likely to have been married before and more likely to have children already.
• Brides who married on Valentine’s Day were more likely to be pregnant on their wedding day than those who married on ordinary dates.

Each of those factors has been linked to greater chances of divorce.

READ MORE: Tips for any couple calling it quits

Another theory is that on “special” dates, wedding venues are more in demand (and hence more pricey) because there are up to fives times more of them. Expensive nuptials were linked to less durable marriages in a 2015 study.

More divorce risk predictors

Other interesting findings in the Australian report were that divorce risks also rose if:

• The wife’s birth and wedding months coincided.
• The wedding happened in the winter or mid-summer (those in the spring and early fall had lower risks).
• A child was born within nine months of marriage to a couple who wasn’t initially living together (it reduced the divorce risk for those who were).
• Remarrying couples didn’t live together for at least a year.
• A couple wed on a Monday or Tuesday (those dates likely don’t draw high attendance, which was named as a predictor of marital longevity in a 2014 study).

READ MORE: August one of the peak times for divorce, research shows