Two words. That is the whole article, two words most people use like they are the same word, and they are not.
Correlation means two things show up together. Causation means one of them actually caused the other. Together is not because. Write that on your hand if you have to, because every bad conclusion in your love life starts with mixing those two up.
Your brain will not help you here. Your brain grabs the most visible thing, the newest thing, the thing it already did not like, and calls it the cause. It feels like knowing. It is just pointing.
Here is the one that lives in my world.
A couple opens their marriage and gets divorced a year later, and everybody blames the opening. Open and shut. Except most couples do not open a strong marriage. Most couples open a dying one, as a last grab on the way down, and when it does not save anything, the opening takes the blame for a death that already happened.
The opening showed up at the scene. Showing up at the scene does not make you the murderer. The marriage was already dying of things nobody could see from the outside, and invisible things make terrible headlines, so the visible thing gets charged.
Same trick, smaller rooms.
Couples who sleep in separate beds divorce more. Also true: snoring, illness, pain, babies, and opposite work shifts put couples in separate beds, and so does not wanting to be near each other anymore. The bed is where it showed. It is not what did it.
Couples who never fight must be doing something right. Some are. Some just stopped caring years ago, and the quiet everybody compliments is the sound of a marriage that already left. The not fighting did not protect them. In plenty of those houses the not fighting was the problem, sitting in plain sight.
Married people live longer, so marriage must be good for you. Healthier, steadier people also marry more and stay married more. The ring is not a vitamin. The selection did half the work before the wedding.
So here is the only homework. Next time somebody hands you a cause, a study, a statistic, a story about what killed a relationship, ask what else was already in the room. Ask what could have driven both things. Half the time the famous cause is just the last thing that showed up, and the last thing that showed up is a witness, not a killer.
Correlation is not causation. Learn those two words and you will watch half the arguments in your life fall apart on their own, including a few you were winning.
Tell me the one you fell for. Everybody has at least one.
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