Alcohol dependency not only affects people who drink excessively, but also spouses, friends and family. Now a new study in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research finds that alcoholism has a strong connection to when people get married and whether those marriages are successful. "For young adults who are drinking, if their drinking continues to levels of problem use, it could impact their likelihood of marriage as well as likelihood of having a really lasting marriage," said study author Mary Waldron, assistant professor in human development at Indiana University. "What we found is yes, it's true that alcohol dependence is a strong predictor of separation and we've known that for quite a while, it was really the predictor of delayed marriage that was surprising to us."The study looked at 5,000 Australian twins, ages 28-92, all of whom reported a history of alcohol dependence sometime over their lifetime. The researchers found the association between alcoholism and getting married for the first time at a 23% lower likelihood for women. For men it was 36% lower only after age 29. For both sexes, the researchers concluded that the chance of separation was twice as likely and earlier. They also found that genetics played a role. "What we found by using both fraternal and identical twins is that genetic influences appear to contribute to the association ... but the processes underlying the genetic effect, we really don't know yet and that will be a focus of future research," Waldron said. She hopes the research will open doors to understanding the consequences of alcoholism on children. "For us to really understand the impact of parental alcoholism on kids, we really need to examine parental marriage and divorce," she said. According to the American Psychological Association, alcohol dependence, or alcoholism, is defined as losing reliable control of one's drinking, causing a higher tolerance and symptoms of withdrawal if the drinking's discontinued. Source: CNN