The dissolution of marital and cohabiting relationships affects the wellbeing of individuals wellbeing and has profound implications for the society. Compatibility between the partners has always been an important factor for such relationships—both for the returns to relationship derived from production complementarities and for those derived from household consumption, which in turn determines thestability of relationships. At the same time, partner’s addictive behaviours such as problem gambling tend to have detrimental effects on the relationships. However, robust quantitative evidence is hard to come by. Thus, in this paper we investigate how the stability of the relationships are affected bypartners’ compatibility in personalities (measured by Big-Five traits) and non-cognitive skills (locus of control), and by the risks of them engaging in problem gambling.  We analysis 11,617 relationship episodes and the 29,149 birth episodes within these relationships of 10,827 women in Australia. The sample is constructed retrieving the history of these women from 20 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. We model the relationship and birth processes simultaneously with a joint duration model featured with non-parametric duration dependence, time-varying covariates, and unobserved heterogeneity. We also investigate how matching (or mis-matching) in the characteristics of the couples such as ethnicity, education, and age may affect the duration of relationships. 

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