Yes, you read that right: Scientific research has found a connection between cervical and testicular cancers and divorce, particularly among young people. The research subjects were all Norwiegan couples, but experts say the results may apply elsewhere, as Norway has similar divorce statistics to other developed countries.

On the bright side, the study found that for couples facing other types of cancer, the divorce rate isn't higher, and for breast cancer — sometimes suggested as likely to cause a divorce — the divorce rate is actually lower than for couples not facing cancer.

The researchers admit that they didn't ask why the couples divorced, so they can't lay the blame on the cancer. Some suggested that the interruption to a young couple's sex life caused by the two cancers might be to blame.

It's obvious there is something significant here — it's not like they just made the results up — but I've got to question the connection between cancer and divorce.

The first thing I thought of when I read the reports was what a sociology professor once told me about ice cream sales causing a rise in rapes. The point she was making was about spurious relationships — false causality. Though the statistics seem to show one, there is no causal relationship — the real cause of both is warm weather. (As it was explained to me, in warm weather people tend to do things like stay outdoors after dark and sleep with the windows open, which makes things easier for an attacker.)

I'm wondering if this latest finding isn't a spurious relationship too — it seems to me that a disrupted sex life is more likely the culprit, and these two cancers are just one reason that could happen. It has to be hard on both partners — and the marriage itself — to lose the ability to be sexual. Sex is important for intamacy; the diseases may be robbing couples of intimacy, and that is what's leading to an increase in divorce.

Since the researchers weren't looking at causes other than cancer, cancer was all they found, and viola, we have headlines warning that testicular or cervical cancer will end your marriage. I'd like to see a study on how lack of sex, for whatever reason, affects marriage, because I think we'd see strikingly similar results to this one.

Randie Thomas, one of First Wives World's newest bloggers, wrote recently about her husband's decision to leave after she began treatment for vulvar cancer. I'm interested to hear what others think, and what experiences you the readers may have had. Do you think these cancers are breaking up marriages?