If you are reading this on your way to work, then your marriage may already be in trouble. Long commutes to work make it more likely a marriage will fail, a study has found.

Those who spend a long time on trains or stuck in cars shuttling to the office are up to 40 per cent more likely to split from their spouse.

The risk is highest in the first few years of marriage when the dream of life together gives way to the daily grind, the study showed.

Experts said that if one partner - most likely the husband - spends 45 minutes or more commuting they would come home too tired to help around the house. This would create a ‘breeding ground for conflict’ that would leave the other person feeling like they are being taken for granted.

The Swedish study looked at statistical data from two million Swedish households between 1995 and 2000. The researchers from Umea University cited the figure of 45 minutes as the kind of commute which could do damage to relationships.

They found that in families where the man commutes, the woman is often forced to take a less qualified job closer to home, which means both less money as well as a larger share of the responsibility for kids and household.

In the first few years of marriage the risk of divorce is 40 per cent higher if one partner has to travel to work.

In Britain millions of commuters now take at least an hour to get to work and the number of commuters travelling for more than an hour has risen by 22 per cent in the past decade. Britons now endure the second longest commute in Europe at 54 minutes a day.

Relationships expert Jean Hannah Edelstein said that unless both partners are commuting, then the commuting partner is going to be absent a lot of the time.

‘This means they have less time to do things with their partner and help out with the domestic chores. The commuting partner - who is more likely to be male - might feel like he shouldn’t have to take on equal responsibility around the home because he’s putting in the long hours back and forth to work.

‘But the partner who is home more might then feel she has been forced to take on too much responsibility and is being pushed into a more traditional female role. This sounds to me like a breeding ground for conflict.’

(Read by Nelly Min. Nelly Min is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)