The Bible says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” But does he have to cleave so much?

A new study from the University of Cambridge Center for Family Research and an organization called the Stand Alone Institute has found that rifts between parents and their son’s wife are among the most common reasons for family estrangement.

The study, which was based on the responses of more than 800 men and women in England who had little or no contact with their families, found that divisions between parents and sons lasted a third longer than those between parents and daughters. The issues most commonly listed as “very relevant” in the breakdown of relationships with daughters included mental health problems and emotional abuse.

But the issues most closely associated with sons included divorce, in-laws and marriage.

As one respondent wrote, “My son and I had a very strong loving relationship for 25 years. He met his soon-to-be wife and our relationship and his relationships with everyone on his side slowly went away. Everyone that knew him including friends and family saw this and felt this. He disowned anyone that does not like his now-wife.”

“Marriage has become so separated from family and community.”

There was a time when these relationships were more likely to end because of parents disowning their children. A child might go astray, marry the wrong person, perhaps outside of the community. Now it seems that the reverse is more common. The researchers report that “those estranged from parents were more likely to report having initiated the estrangement, whereas those estranged from children were more likely to report that their son or daughter had cut contact with them.”

So what’s changed? How we marry, for one thing.

As we are getting married later in life, it is less likely that a parent would be able to tell us whom to marry. It’s much easier to demand obedience from a 25-year-old than a 35-year-old. But there are other factors too. Marriage has become so separated from family and community. We have moved from marriages as economic alliances between families and beyond arranged marriages for religious and cultural purposes toward the soulmate model of marriage, in which the only thing that matters is whether two people are in love. We have largely discounted the opinions of family when making decisions about a spouse.

But that has unfortunate consequences. When multiple generations of families get along, it has positive effects for everyone. Vern Bengtson, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, has been studying extended families for the better part of four decades now. He says, “These intergenerational connections are protective factors for a lot of life risk conditions.”

Indeed, Bengtson suggests there are not a lot of downsides to these relationships. “The stereotype of a terrible mother-in-law is really a myth. I don’t know of any study that has found any link between marital unhappiness and conflict with in-laws.” On the other hand, he says, “You do hear happily married couples talk about how satisfying their new family ties are and how much they respect father-in-law or mother-in-law.”

But it is interesting that cases of estrangement are more likely to occur with sons. Is it true, as they say, that a son is a son until he takes a wife, but a daughter is a daughter all her life?

More likely it is simply a matter of the way families work. Wives tend to be the ones who are in charge of a family’s social life, its travel schedule, planning for holidays, etc. If they don’t want much contact with extended family, they may be able to exert a kind of practical influence over that that husbands simply don’t.

Lauren Groff’s bestselling novel of last year, “Fates and Furies,” offers a useful — if extreme — example of this dynamic. The story of a 25-year marriage is told first from the perspective of the husband Lotto and then from the perspective of Mathilde, the wife. The fact that Lotto’s mother doesn’t approve of Mathilde is revealed early in the novel. The couple is cut off in every sense. But it is only later that we learn how year in and year out, Mathilde has ensured that no reconciliation is possible.

It’s not an attractive picture of extended families, but for many it is the sad reality.