Don't Take These Jobs If You Want to Get Married

By Dorothy Gambrell January 07, 2015

If you have a crush on your dentist, you might be barking up the wrong tree: 81 percent of dentists are already married—the highest marriage rate for any profession. Someone’s chosen occupation, it turns out, can tell you a lot about the chances they’re single, married, divorced, or in some other relationship arrangement. Using Census data and data from the American Community Survey, we charted marriage and divorce rates across occupations from from 1950 to 2010.

Crossing guards are the most likely to be widowed. Plasterers are most likely to be married and living apart from their spouse, just ahead of people in the military. What kind of life will you live as a motion picture projectionist? You will be single. In 1950, three of the top 10 occupations most likely to be married were mathematicians and engineers, and power plant operators had the highest marriage rates. By 2010, stability-seekers had turned to the health-care professions. We will probably always have mouths, which gives dentists the kind of job security that can invigorate a relationship, helping to explain why dentists have consistently made the top 10 and have topped the list since 2010.

The divorce-friendly professions have their own trajectory, with creative types making up half the top 10 in 1950 and mostly people in manufacturing jobs today. People with manufacturing jobs barely appeared in the top 10 until 1990, but with the industry’s heyday far behind us, they now make up half the top 10. The decline of manufacturing jobs since the 1970s suggests that working in a shrinking industry might put a strain on marriages. Nurses, social workers, therapists, and bartenders—in other words, people who listen to people complain all day—have been common divorcées throughout the decades.

Who’s single? Since 1990, it has most commonly been those with jobs in protective services. Tip your bouncers.