It might not surprise you to hear that Nevada has the highest rate of divorced people nationally. Las Vegas is after all the wedding -- and divorce -- capital of the country. But you might be interested to learn that Maine's divorce rate is right behind Nevada -- number 2 in fact.

According to the Pew Research Center, 15 percent of Maine women are currently divorced, compared to the national average of 12 percent, and 12 percent of Maine men are currently divorced, compared to nine percent nationally.

Why one state would have a higher divorce rate than another remains a bit of a mystery. "When it came to divorce, per se, we didn't find too many correlations," says Paul Taylor, who directs Pew's Social and Demographics Trends project. "We were able to correlate high levels of divorce with the tendency of residents in the state to marry young, and there was a correlation there."

Residents in Maine, however, don't marry young compared to folks in other states. The median age for Maine women to marry is 29; for men, it's 27 -- in both cases, a year older than the national average.

So there are other factors at play. But what are they? "The issue is more about the working-class composition of the Maine population," says Brad Wilcox, who is with the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. Wilcox, who is also an Associate Professor of Sociology, says working-class people are more vulnerable to divorce.

Many Mainers fall into that cateogry. Mainers make less money than people living elsewhere in the Northeast. In addition, the percentage of Mainers with college degrees is less than the national average.

"College-educated couples are about half as likely to divorce now as are working class couples, and this divide has never been so large as it is today," Wilcox says. "College-educated couples on average, of course, have higher incomes and that protects them from economic stresses that can undermine a marriage. It's also the case that college-educated couples tend to have better social skills. They can deal with conflict, they're better able to communicate."

Bill Cote, a trial lawyer in Lewiston who handles divorces, says he doesn't have a handle on why Maine's rates are so high. But he has noticed that a couple's financial woes are a major driver of divorce.

"We are a poor state in many respects," Cote says. "And one of the things that I certainly find in my family law practice is that financial pressures really wreak havoc on the sustainability of a mariraige unit. It's really difficult to persist when it's kind of hard to pay the bills and keep shelter and food on the table and have adequate transportation so you can get to and from work."

Cote adds that it is relatively easy to get a divorce in Maine. Just one party has to request the divorce, and need only cite irreconcilable differences. "And so there is very little that an opposing party -- the other spouse that is -- can do to derail the request for a divorce if one party is hell-bent-for-leather in getting a divorce."

Peg Libby of the Kids First Center, which helps divorcing parents work together to raise their children, thinks what sets Maine apart is that it's not a particularly religious state, and less beholden to traditional church doctrines governing marriage. "Maine is, I think, a more tolerant state, in some ways a more liberal state, and so there may be a greater acceptance of people recognizing that an unhappy marriage is also very difficult for children and that life could be better."

Indeed, a survey released earlier this year by Trinity College showed that northern New England was the most secular region of the country. A quarter of Mainers surveyed said they have no religion.

In case you were wondering, the rates of divorced people in New Hampshire and Vermont were also above the national average.