This is the ideal age gap for any relationship

They say that "you can't put a price on love" - but can you put an age on it?

Allow us to explain.

The age gap between two people in a relationship has been discovered to dramatically effect how successful that relationship can be when it comes to marriage.

This is according to an extensive study carried out by two professors in the Department of Economics at Emory University in Atlanta.

Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon studied 3,000 people for the research, with Randal Olsen of Michigan State University then crunching the raw data.

He found that the relationships that had the larger age gaps often had the highest divorce rates.

You might be thinking that this only applies to couples that have a huge age gap, like 10 years or so. To an extent that is true.

Married couples who had a 10-year age difference were 39 percent more likely to get divorced while those with a 20-year difference had a 95 percent chance of splitting.

Yet even a five-year age gap between individuals had an 18 percent chance of ending unhappily, which might come as a surprise to some.

In fact, the best chance of having a successful marriage is to marry someone with only a 12-month age difference to yours.

This figure had just a 3 per cent chance of ending in divorce.

There isn't any scientific reason as to why this happens but there are potentially several factors at play.

For instance, men's sex drives decrease as they meet middle age whereas it increases for women when they meet the same stage in their life.

That would obviously lead to problems in the bedroom but having children could actually save a marriage.

According to the New York Post, Olsen found that couples who had a child during marriage were 76 per cent less like to call it a day.

That can lead to other stresses which Randy Kessler, author of Divorce: Protect Yourself, Your Kids, and Your Future explains:

Having children may postpone a divorce, but often it ends up bringing even more tension to a relationship and more to argue about, more costs, more demands on their time, which all lead to stress, which often leads to divorce.

With all this in consideration it should be pointed out that if a couple can reach two years of marriage they are 43 per cent less likely to divorce, which then increases to 94 per cent once they reach 10 years together.

Of course, a couple can try all of these things during marriage and still fail to make it work for each other.

Hugo Mialon, one of the chief authors of the study believes that this is just down to the personality of an individual and there is virtually nothing they can do about it.

He adds:

It could just be that the types of couples with those characteristics are the types of couples who are, on average, more likely to divorce for other reasons.

HT Her

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