Remember the Primrose Hill set? Jude Law and Sadie Frost, Noel Gallagher and Meg Mathews, Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit. Celebrity couples with everything going for them, rich, beautiful and all good friends. And yet none of them are still together.

A new study has come up with a possible explanation, suggesting that the break-up of relationships within groups of friends is contagious – one couple within a social group divorces and their friends' relationships collapse around them like ninepins.

The researchers have called it "divorce clustering" and say that a split up between immediate friends increases your own chances of getting divorced by 75%. The effect drops to 33% if the divorce is between friends of a friend, what the researchers call two degrees of separation, then disappears almost completely at three degrees of separation. It is not only the marital status of friends but also siblings and colleagues which has a significant effect on how long your own marriage might last. Breaking up will catch on among your friends, and the more divorcees you know, the higher your own chances of becoming one.

The research comes from sociologists and psychologists from three North American universities who have examined statistics from a group of individuals over a 32-year period. They looked at the effect of divorce among peer groups on an individual's own risk of divorce and found a clear process of what the scientists called "social contagion". The study was carried out by academics Rose McDermott at Brown University, James Fowler at the University of California and Nicholas Christakis at Harvard.

They used the Framingham Heart Study – a longitudinal study of the population of a small Massachusetts town near Boston which was started in 1948 to investigate risk for heart disease but has since become a godsend for social research because of the wealth of information that continues to be collected from generation after generation of residents. The statistics also follow people who have left the town and suggest that a divorced friend or family member who lives hundreds of miles away may have as much influence on risk of divorce as one who lives next door. It also found that the presence of children within a marriage did not in itself influence the likelihood of people getting divorced. But each child a couple had further reduced the parents' susceptibility to being influenced by divorcing friends. The report suggested that the "normalising" of splits could be to blame. It also found that "divorcees have denser social networks and are much more likely to remarry other divorcees". The study threw up further bad news for divorcees – they stand to lose 10% of friends and are seen by some as a social threat.

In the US, 50% of marriages end in divorce within the first 15 years and the annual incidence of divorce is 36 per 1,000 couples. In the UK the annual rate is just 11.5 out of 1,000 married couples divorcing each year. The low rates in Britain – in 2008 the divorce rate was the lowest for 29 years – were attributed to the Labour government's investment in family counselling services and a rise in separation agreements where couples live separate lives but don't divorce for reasons of cost or the children's sake.

The US report concluded that we need to recognise the far-reaching effects of a marital breakdown and treat it as a disease that will spread unless couples recognise the risk and talk openly about their friends' break-ups. "Divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected," concludes the report, which says friends ought to support each other through marital problems for selfish as well as compassionate reasons.