Why Marriage Matters - The Evidence

6th August 2026

Children, adults and the country do best where a man and a woman marry, and this page is the evidence. It opens with 27 headline figures, each with its source, then sets out the case for children, for health and for household finances, and answers the strongest objection, that "married couples were just better off anyway". The statistics on marriage itself - how many marry, who, at what age and how the numbers have moved - are at https://www.c4m.org.uk/marriage-support/marriage-facts-and-figures.

In brief: By their 14th birthday, 46 per cent of UK first-born children are no longer living with both natural parents, and most of that breakdown comes from unmarried parents splitting up, not from divorce. Marriage is where family stability is concentrated, and the evidence for that runs through Britain's national studies and the best research abroad: cohabiting parents are more than three times as likely to separate as married parents; the children of married parents do better at school and have fewer emotional difficulties; married adults live longer, report better mental health and are markedly happier; married and civil-partnered women and men are half as likely as those who cohabit to suffer domestic abuse; and family breakdown costs the taxpayer an estimated £51 billion a year. A June 2026 re-analysis of the Millennium Cohort found between half and two thirds of the stability gap between parents who marry and parents who never do still there after allowing for 27 differences between the couples, income and education among them.

ON THIS PAGE

 

THE HEADLINE FIGURES

Twenty-seven claims, each with its source and checked in October 2026, for quoting in a letter, a meeting or a debate. The fuller argument behind them follows below.

THE SCALE OF THE RETREAT

  1. In 2023, England and Wales registered 216,901 marriages between a man and a woman, 46 per cent fewer than the 400,435 of 1973. For every 1,000 people, 7.1 married in 2023 against 16.2 in 1973 - the lowest rate in a record that begins in 1862, outside the Covid years of 2020 and 2021. With same-sex marriages and civil partnerships, 231,949 unions were formed in 2023.1233

  2. Marriage between a man and a woman is now the arrangement of under half of adults - 49.8 per cent in 2025. On the marital status estimates of the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 51.1 per cent of adults aged 18 and over in England and Wales were married or in a civil partnership in 2025, down from 52.3 per cent in 2015. Take out civil partnerships (0.9 per cent) and same-sex marriages (0.4 per cent) and marriage between a man and a woman stands at 49.8 per cent. The 2021 Census put married-or-civil-partnered adults aged 16 and over at 46.9 per cent, down from 58.4 per cent in 1991.3 4

  3. Unmarried cohabiting-couple families reached 3.5 million in 2025 - 17.6 per cent of all UK families. Married couples of a man and a woman made up 64.7 per cent of families, down from 66.5 per cent in 2015.534

STABILITY - THE HEART OF THE CASE

  1. 82 per cent of adults aged 16 to 54 who were married in 1991 were living with the same partner 10 years later, against 61 per cent of those cohabiting, according to the Government's own evidence review of Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study data.6

  2. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, following Millennium Cohort families, found just 12 per cent of couples who were married when their child was born had experienced a period of separation by the child's seventh birthday - against 32 per cent of cohabiting couples, nearly three times as many.7

  3. Married parents with dependent children under 16 split up at 1.9 per cent a year, cohabiting parents at 6.5 per cent - 3.4 times the rate.11 Unmarried parents are around one fifth of couples but account for half of all family breakdown.8

  4. Parents who married before their first child was conceived had a three in four chance of still being together at the child's 14th birthday. Their chance of separating was 26 per cent, against 45 per cent for parents who never married, once 27 differences between the couples are allowed for.9

  5. More than eight in ten of the couples who married in 2015 hadn't divorced by their 10th anniversary - 83.7 per cent. The claim that half of marriages end in divorce is a myth, and no group of couples married in any one year since 1963 has reached half. And the ONS's own comparison shows the couples who married in 1995 divorced more at the same point - nearly one in four (24.7 per cent) within 10 years, and 38.1 per cent within 20.1029

"MARRIED COUPLES WERE JUST BETTER OFF ANYWAY" - ANSWERED

  1. No. The Marriage Foundation found the "gap in stability" affects every income bracket. Among the very richest parents, 2.9 per cent separated if cohabiting against 1 per cent if married. Among the very poorest, 8.9 per cent separated if cohabiting against 2.8 per cent if married. The very poorest married couples are slightly more likely to stay together than the very richest cohabiting ones.11

  2. Allow for 27 differences between the couples, income and education among them, and between half and two thirds of the stability gap between parents who marry and parents who never do is still there. That's the finding of a June 2026 Marriage Foundation study, carried out with the Centre for Social Justice, of more than 6,000 couples in the Millennium Cohort who were first-time parents living together when their child was born, followed for up to 14 years.12

CHILDREN

  1. By age 14, 46 per cent of UK first-born children aren't living with both natural parents. Among teenagers whose natural parents are still together, 84 per cent of those parents are married.13

  2. Children born to married parents do best at GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education, usually awarded at 16), with 74 per cent of boys and 81 per cent of girls passing both English and Maths, against 61 and 66 per cent where the parents never married, and 46 and 63 per cent for children born to a single parent. We worked out these pass rates from the Marriage Foundation's failure rates, which were 26 and 19 per cent where the parents were married, 39 and 34 where they never married, and 54 and 37 for a single parent.14

HEALTH

  1. Among men aged 20 to 64 in England and Wales, single men died in 2019 at an age-standardised rate of 509.5 per 100,000. Men who were married or in a civil partnership died at 165.9 - roughly a third of the rate.15

  2. Men and women who are married or in a civil partnership are the least likely to take their own lives. Following 35 million adults in England and Wales from the 2011 Census to the end of 2021, the Office for National Statistics found the lowest suicide rates among those who were married or in a civil partnership - at the study's average age of 45, 12.85 per 100,000 men against 32.01 for single men, and 4.17 per 100,000 women against 9.99 for single women. In 2015, its figures showed divorced men almost three times as likely to end their lives as men who were married or in a civil partnership.3016

THE ASPIRATION GAP
  1. The young want marriage. Among unmarried under-30s in a relationship, 86 per cent of women and 80 per cent of men said in 2021 that they would like to get married at some point.17 Three quarters of Gen Z adults, aged 18 to 27, want to get married too.18 Yet on present trends only 58 per cent of Gen Z women and 56 per cent of Gen Z men in England and Wales ever will.19
THE GOOD NEWS NOBODY PRINTS

  1. Nearly three in four of the couples who married in 1963 never divorced, and the couples of 2015 divorced less in their first 10 years than those of any other year from 1973 onwards. By their diamond anniversary in 2023, 27.1 per cent of the 1963 couples had divorced, so 72.9 per cent hadn't, and two years on the share was unchanged. Of the couples who married in 2015, the latest to reach their 10th anniversary, 16.3 per cent had divorced by it.29

  2. More than two couples marry for every one that divorces. In 2023, England and Wales recorded 216,901 marriages between a man and a woman and 100,787 divorces of opposite-sex couples.1 29

  3. Most babies are now born inside marriage or civil partnership, and the share has risen three years running. In 2025, 311,703 of the 585,396 births in England and Wales - 53.2 per cent - were within marriage or civil partnership, up from 48.6 per cent in 2022, 50.5 per cent in 2023 and 52.4 per cent in 2024. (Our calculation from the ONS birth registration tables.)20

  4. People who are married or in a civil partnership are the most satisfied with their lives. The Office for National Statistics finds that they "are most likely to report higher life satisfaction than those of any other marital status".21

  5. Married mothers and fathers are the happiest adults in America. In the 2022 General Social Survey, 40 per cent of married mothers aged 18 to 55 said they were very happy, against 25 per cent of married women without children, 22 per cent of unmarried childless women and 17 per cent of unmarried mothers. Among men, 35 per cent of married fathers were very happy against under 15 per cent of unmarried men. Married men are about twice as likely to be very happy as their unmarried peers. (American data.)22

  6. Across 22 countries, married adults report the best mental health of any group the study tabulates, and Britain ranks near the bottom. The Global Flourishing Study asked 202,898 adults, 5,368 of them in the United Kingdom, to rate their mental health from nought to ten. Married adults averaged 7.91, the widowed 7.83, the divorced 7.53, those in a domestic partnership 7.50 and the separated 7.37, a pattern the authors call particularly evident in 11 of the 22 countries, including the United States, Australia, Germany, Sweden and Spain. The United Kingdom's national average, 6.80, was the third lowest of the 22. These averages don't allow for any other differences.23

  7. Married fathers are the most employed men in America, and have been for 50 years. In 2025, 92 per cent of married men with children at home were in full-time work against 82 per cent of unmarried fathers. Unemployment among married mothers of young children was 1 per cent against 5 per cent for unmarried mothers. And married mothers were twice as likely as unmarried mothers to say their spouse or partner gives them a lot of help - 63 per cent against 31.24

  8. Finish school, work full time and marry before having children, in that order, and almost nobody stays poor. Among American Millennials who completed that sequence, 97 per cent weren't poor at ages 32 to 38 and 86 per cent had reached at least the middle class. Among those raised without both biological parents who completed it, 95 per cent weren't poor. Of those who missed all three steps, 52 per cent were poor. And marrying before having children, after allowing for employment, race, ethnicity, family background and childhood poverty, cut the odds of poverty by 60 per cent. (American data.)25 26

  9. The safest home for a child is with married biological parents. The United States government's Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect found that children living with their two married biological parents had the lowest rate of maltreatment of any family arrangement - 6.8 per 1,000 children on the study's stricter measure. On its broader measure, children whose single parent lived with an unmarried partner suffered abuse at more than 10 times the rate of children with married biological parents - 45.8 per 1,000 against 4.3. (American data.)27

  10. Women who marry live longer - on the strongest recent test, a third less likely to die over the following two decades than women who remained never married. Harvard researchers followed 11,830 American nurses who were never married in 1989. Those who married over the next four years were 35 per cent less likely to have died 20 years on than those who didn't, after allowing for their health, habits and circumstances at the start. Any woman who later divorced was still counted on the married side. (American data.)28

  11. A woman who's married or in a civil partnership is half as likely to suffer domestic abuse as a woman living with a partner she hasn't married, and the same is true of men. In the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year to March 2025, 5.1 per cent of married or civil-partnered women had suffered domestic abuse in the previous year, against 10.2 per cent of cohabiting women and 14.1 per cent of single women. For men the figures were 3.7, 7.4 and 10.4 per cent.31

  12. Children of married parents had the lowest rate of mental disorder in England's 2017 national survey. That year 6.2 per cent of 5 to 10 year olds whose parent was married had a mental disorder, against 12.2 per cent where the parent was cohabiting and 17.0 and 18.2 per cent with a lone parent. Children of a previously married lone parent were still more likely to have a disorder after the survey allowed for how well the family got on, the parent's own mental health and other differences. The NHS's follow-up surveys to 2023 publish no such breakdown, so 2017 is still the latest year.3235

Quote these figures, and join the Coalition for Marriage to receive its briefings at https://www.c4m.org.uk/subscribe.

SOURCES FOR THE HEADLINE FIGURES
  1. Office for National Statistics, Marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales: 2023, released 18 November 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/bulletins/marriagesinenglandandwalesprovisional/2023
  2. Centre for Social Justice, I Do? The state of marriage in the United Kingdom, February 2026. https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CSJ-I_Do.pdf
  3. Office for National Statistics, Marriage and civil partnership status in England and Wales: Census 2021. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/articles/marriageandcivilpartnershipstatusenglandandwalescensus2021/2023-02-22
  4. Office for National Statistics, Population estimates by marital status and living arrangements, England and Wales: 2025, released 31 July 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/populationestimatesbymaritalstatusandlivingarrangements/2025
  5. Office for National Statistics, Families and households in the UK: 2025, released 17 April 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2025
  6. Department for Work and Pensions research report no. 1031, Are household formation decisions and living together fraud & error affected by the Living Together as a Married Couple policy? An Evidence Review, May 2022, page 24. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64a57b6a4dd8b3000f7fa507/living-together-fraud-household-formation.pdf
  7. Institute for Fiscal Studies, Cohabitation, marriage, relationship stability and child outcomes, Report R87, Table 7.1. https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/r87.pdf
  8. Marriage Foundation, Unmarried parents account for one fifth of couples but half of all family breakdown, briefing note, December 2013. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/MF-briefing-note-proportion-of-family-breakdown-from-cohabitation-v2.pdf
  9. Marriage Foundation with the Centre for Social Justice, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, June 2026, chapters 5, 7 and 8. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-The-Timing-of-Marriage_digital-1.pdf
  10. Office for National Statistics, Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales: 2024 and 2025, released 23 September 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2024and2025
  11. Marriage Foundation, Married poor more stable than unmarried rich, May 2022. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/married-poor-more-stable-than-unmarried-rich/
  12. The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, research briefing, June 2026, chapters 5 and 8. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-The-Timing-of-Marriage_digital-1.pdf
  13. Marriage Foundation, Source of Family Breakdown. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/
  14. Marriage Foundation, Marriage and GCSE results, June 2023. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MF-report-Families-and-Education.pdf
  15. Office for National Statistics, Mortality by marital status in England and Wales: 2010 to 2019. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/mortalitybymaritalstatusinenglandandwales/2010to2019
  16. Office for National Statistics, Who is most at risk of suicide?, September 2017. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/whoismostatriskofsuicide/2017-09-07
  17. OnePoll survey of 2,000 adults aged 18 to 30 for Marriage Foundation, May 2021, reported in the Centre for Social Justice's I Do? at source 2 above. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/tiktok-generation-say-i-want-to-get-married/
  18. Opinium, survey of 2,000 Gen Z adults aged 18 to 27, for Charles Russell Speechlys, September 2025. https://www.charlesrussellspeechlys.com/en/insights/expert-insights/private-client/2025/gen-z-and-milestone-planning/
  19. Marriage Foundation, The collapse of marriage among Gen Z, December 2024. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-collapse-of-marriage-among-gen-z/
  20. Office for National Statistics, Births in England and Wales: birth registrations, Table 6, 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/birthsinenglandandwalesbirthregistrations
  21. Office for National Statistics, Measuring national well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023, released 6 November 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringnationalwellbeing/april2022tomarch2023
  22. Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang, Who Is Happiest? Married Mothers and Fathers, Per the Latest General Social Survey, Institute for Family Studies, 12 September 2023. https://ifstudies.org/blog/who-is-happiest-married-mothers-and-fathers-per-the-latest-general-social-survey
  23. Okafor, C.N., Jean-Berluche, D., Paltzer, J., Kwon, E., Grigoropoulou, N., VanderWeele, T.J. and Johnson, B.R., A cross-national analysis of demographic variation in self-rated mental health across 22 countries, Communications Medicine, 31 July 2025, Table 3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12313904/
  24. Wang, W. and Erickson, J., More Married Mothers of Young Children Are Working Full Time, Institute for Family Studies, November 2025, pages 17, 20 and 33. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-womenwork-nov2025-final2.pdf
  25. Wang, W. and Wilcox, W.B., The Power of the Success Sequence for Disadvantaged Young Adults, Institute for Family Studies and American Enterprise Institute, May 2022, pages 2 and 4. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/successsequencedisadvantagedya-final.pdf
  26. Institute for Family Studies, Fact Sheet: The Power of the Success Sequence, April 2025, pages 1 and 2. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/success_sequence/finalsuccesssequencefactsheet.pdf
  27. Sedlak, A.J. and colleagues, Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4): Report to Congress, United States Department of Health and Human Services, January 2010, pages 151 and 163. https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/opre/nis4_report_congress_full_pdf_jan2010.pdf
  28. Chen, Y., Mathur, M.B., Case, B.W. and VanderWeele, T.J., Marital transitions during earlier adulthood and subsequent health and well-being in mid- to late-life among female nurses: An outcome-wide analysis, Global Epidemiology 5, 2023, 100099. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10445961/
  29. Office for National Statistics, Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales, workbook released 23 September 2026, Tables 1 and 9b. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/datasets/divorcesanddissolutionsinenglandandwales
  30. Office for National Statistics, Sociodemographic inequalities in suicides in England and Wales: 2011 to 2021, released 6 March 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthinequalities/bulletins/sociodemographicinequalitiesinsuicidesinenglandandwales/2011to2021
  31. Office for National Statistics, Domestic abuse prevalence and victim characteristics, appendix tables, year ending March 2025, Table 4, released 26 November 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/domesticabuseprevalenceandvictimcharacteristicsappendixtables/yearendingmarch2025
  32. NHS Digital, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017: Predictors of mental disorders, 26 March 2019, pages 18 and 23. https://files.digital.nhs.uk/85/7FFC57/MHCYP%202017%20Predictors.pdf
  33. Office for National Statistics, Marriages in England and Wales, 2023 workbook, Tables 1a and 10a. https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/datasets/marriagesinenglandandwales2013/2023/marriagesworkbook2023.xlsx
  34. Office for National Statistics, Families and households in the UK: 2025, workbook, Table 9. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/datasets/familiesandhouseholdsfamiliesandhouseholds
  35. NHS England, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2023: wave 4 follow up to the 2017 survey, data tables, 21 November 2023. https://files.digital.nhs.uk/2D/D88231/mhcyp_2023_tab.xlsx

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CHILDREN DO BEST WITH MARRIED PARENTS

Marriage Foundation analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study - the national study following around 19,000 children born at the millennium - finds that 46 per cent of UK first-born children aren't living with both natural parents by age 14, and that the break-up of unmarried parents, not divorce, accounts for the great majority of that loss (Marriage Foundation, Source of Family Breakdown, July 2023, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/.) Among the parents still together at that 14th birthday, 84 per cent are married and only 16 per cent are cohabiting (from the same Marriage Foundation analysis.)

A June 2026 re-analysis of the same cohort went further. Published by the Marriage Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Social Justice, it followed more than 6,000 couples who were first-time parents living together when their child was born, for up to 14 years. Once 27 differences between the couples were allowed for, income, education and ethnicity among them, the chance of separating by the child's 14th birthday was 45 per cent for parents who never married, against 26 per cent for those who married before conception. Those differences left between half and two thirds of the original gap unexplained (Marriage Foundation, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, June 2026, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-The-Timing-of-Marriage_digital-1.pdf.)

The stability gap holds at every income level. Using Understanding Society data across five periods from 2009 to 2018, the Marriage Foundation found cohabiting parents 3.4 times more likely to split than married parents, 6.5 per cent a year against 1.9 per cent, with the gap present in all five income quintiles. Among the very poorest parents, 8.9 per cent of cohabiting couples separated each year against 2.8 per cent of married couples. The poorest married parents were slightly more stable than the richest cohabiting parents (Marriage Foundation, Married Poor More Stable than Unmarried Rich, May 2022, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/married-poor-more-stable-than-unmarried-rich/.) So income doesn't explain the gap. Nor do the mother's ethnicity, religion and family background, since allowing for them still left 16.7 points of the Institute for Fiscal Studies' 19.7-point gap in separation by the child's third birthday. Its further controls, and the argument over them, are set out below.

The early years tell the same story. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, using the same cohort, found that 26 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated by their child's third birthday against 7 per cent of married couples, and that by the fifth birthday 27 per cent of the couples who had been cohabiting at the birth were no longer living together, against 9 per cent of the married (IFS Briefing Note BN107, 2010, at https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn107.pdf.) The Centre for Longitudinal Studies counted only the couples who never separated at all. Of the parents who were married when their child was born, 88 per cent stayed together throughout the child's first five years, against 67 per cent of those who had been cohabiting (Kiernan and Mensah, Millennium Cohort Study Briefing 1, Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 2010, at https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/01_briefing_web.pdf.)

Stability shows up in the classroom. Marriage Foundation analysis of GCSE outcomes found that among children born to married parents, 26 per cent of boys and 19 per cent of girls failed to reach a grade 4 in English and Maths. Among children born to parents who never married, the failure rates were 39 per cent for boys and 34 per cent for girls. Among children born to single parents, 54 per cent of boys and 37 per cent of girls failed (Marriage Foundation, Marriage and GCSE results, June 2023, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MF-report-Families-and-Education.pdf.)

Stability shows in children's behaviour and mental health too. The Centre for Social Justice's 2020 report Family Structure Still Matters found that family structure has a greater bearing on children's externalising behaviours - the problems linked to school attainment, criminal justice involvement and emotional development - than education or poverty (Centre for Social Justice, Family Structure Still Matters, 2020, at https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/new-report-family-structure-still-matters.) England's national survey of children's mental health points the same way. In 2017, 6.2 per cent of 5 to 10 year olds whose parent was married had a mental disorder, against 12.2 per cent where the parent was cohabiting and 17.0 and 18.2 per cent where the parent was a single or previously married lone parent. Among 11 to 16 year olds the gap was wider still, 11.6 per cent against 27.4 per cent with a single lone parent, and at both ages children of a lone parent were still more likely to have a disorder after the survey allowed for how well the family got on, the parent's own mental health and other differences (NHS Digital, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017: Predictors of mental disorders, 26 March 2019, at https://files.digital.nhs.uk/85/7FFC57/MHCYP%202017%20Predictors.pdf.) The published tables of the NHS's follow-up surveys, to 2023, don't break the figures down by family type or parents' marital status at all, so 2017 is still the latest year with this comparison, even as the share of 8 to 16 year olds with a probable mental disorder rose from 12.5 per cent in 2017 to 20.3 per cent in 2023 (NHS England, 2023 data tables, at https://files.digital.nhs.uk/2D/D88231/mhcyp_2023_tab.xlsx.) The Government should start publishing these figures.

And the finding is neither new nor only British. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur's landmark 1994 American study found that children whose natural parents live apart were twice as likely to drop out of high school and one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood - a pattern the authors traced across the spectrum of race, gender and class (McLanahan and Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent, Harvard University Press, 1994, at https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674364080.) Young American men who were growing up without their biological father in the home in 1997 were about twice as likely to have spent time in jail by around 30, 21 per cent against 10 per cent, and the gap held after allowing for family income, race, the mother's education, age and test scores (Institute for Family Studies, Life Without Father, 17 June 2022, at https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-without-father-less-college-less-work-and-more-prison-for-young-men-growing-up-without-their-biological-father.)

In Sweden, a population-based study of almost a million children found that those living with a single parent were at least twice as likely as those living with two to suffer psychiatric disease in childhood and to attempt suicide, after allowing for the family's socioeconomic position and the parents' own addiction or mental illness (Weitoft, Hjern, Haglund and Rosén, The Lancet, 2003, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12559862/.) And a 2019 meta-analysis of 54 studies and 506,299 people found that those whose parents had divorced had 1.29 times the odds of depression and 1.48 times the odds of suicidal thinking (Auersperg, Vlasak, Ponocny and Barth, Journal of Psychiatric Research, 2019, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31622869/.)

A study for the Ministry of Justice found the same order at age 11. Children of continuously married parents "tended to have the best outcomes at age 11, followed by children of parents who were cohabiting at the time of birth and remained together", and children of separated parents the worst. After a separation, contact with the parent who had left tended to be higher, on a number of measures, where the parents had been married (Goisis, Ozcan and Sigle, London School of Economics, Child outcomes after parental separation, Ministry of Justice Analytical Series, 2016, at https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/25543/1/child-outcomes-after-parental-separation.pdf.)

The married home is also the safest. The United States government's Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect found children living with their two married biological parents had the lowest rate of maltreatment of any family arrangement - 6.8 per 1,000 children under the study's stricter Harm Standard. Under its broader Endangerment Standard, children whose single parent lived with an unmarried partner suffered abuse at 45.8 per 1,000 against 4.3 for children with married biological parents, more than 10 times the rate. They suffered neglect at 100.8 per 1,000 against 12.8 (Sedlak and colleagues, Report to Congress, January 2010, pages 151 to 165, at https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/opre/nis4_report_congress_full_pdf_jan2010.pdf.) The pattern is old and international. In Hamilton, Ontario, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that pre-school children living with one natural parent and a stepparent were 40 times as likely to be recorded as child-abuse cases as children living with both natural parents, a gap that income, family size and the mother's age at the birth couldn't account for (Daly and Wilson, Ethology and Sociobiology, 1985, Table 5, at https://www.martindaly.ca/uploads/2/3/7/0/23707972/daly___wilson_1985_child_abuse.pdf.)

The effect reaches beyond the front door. Raj Chetty's Opportunity Atlas, built from the tax records of 20 million American children, found that the share of single-parent households in a neighbourhood was among the strongest predictors of whether a poor child fails to rise, and that children of single parents themselves do better where more of the families around them are intact (Chetty, Friedman, Hendren, Jones and Porter, The Opportunity Atlas, January 2025 revision, page 25, at https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/atlas_paper.pdf.)

The newest American evidence, a September 2026 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), shows where the gap holds. Among Americans born in the 1990s, 46.6 per cent of those whose mothers were married when they were born had a four-year degree by 25, against 17.3 per cent of those whose mothers weren't - a gap of 29.3 points, close to the 30.4 for the 1980s births and far wider than the 21.2 for the 1970s. The same study found the gap in staying out of poverty at 25 narrowing, to 9.8 points for the 1990s births, and no longer significant once the mother's education was allowed for. The authors set that beside broad gains in the living standards of unmarried mothers' families, and the work they cite puts the fall in single mothers' poverty down to higher earnings and to transfer income from the state. Money can lift a family above the poverty line, but it hasn't closed the college gap, which the authors link to the extra investment children get from two well-resourced parents at home. The authors also count children of cohabiting couples as born to unmarried mothers, which, they say, makes the gaps they measure smaller wherever those couples pool their money and invest in their children as married parents do (Kearney, Levine and Barson, The Evolving Marriage Gap in Children's Outcomes, NBER Working Paper 35765, September 2026, at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35765/w35765.pdf.)

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THE HEALTH DIVIDEND

Married people live longer. Single people carry a 55 per cent higher risk of death from all causes than married people, a 52 per cent higher risk of cardiovascular death and a 14 per cent higher risk of cancer death - with the divorced carrying a 39 per cent higher all-cause risk and the widowed 43 per cent - according to an updated systematic review and meta-analysis pooling 12 international cohort studies with 1,785,857 participants (2025, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12612516/.) The Office for National Statistics (ONS) Longitudinal Study - a record-linkage study of one per cent of the population of England and Wales - found raised mortality, compared with men in long first marriages, among never-married men, widowers, men divorced for 10 to 20 years and men in long-term remarriages. One British study the authors cite found health in early old age rising with the share of life spent married (Grundy and Tomassini, BMC Public Health, 2010, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2954998/.)

The strongest recent test comes from Harvard. Following 11,830 American nurses who were never married in 1989, Tyler VanderWeele and colleagues compared those who married over the next four years with those who didn't, and counted anyone who later divorced on the married side, which if anything understates what marriage does. Twenty years on, the women who had married were 35 per cent less likely to have died, with a third fewer strokes and a third less coronary heart disease, and reported more optimism and purpose and less loneliness, after allowing for their health, habits and circumstances at the start (Chen, Mathur, Case and VanderWeele, Global Epidemiology, 2023, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10445961/.) The authors note that healthier women were also more likely to marry, and that nurses aren't the whole nation, but the finding held after their adjustments.

Within marriage, a supportive husband or wife protects health as well. Among 7,788 married Americans in their 60s, those with the most supportive spouses were a third less likely to be diagnosed with depression four years later than those with the least, after allowing for how they were doing at the start (de la Rosa and VanderWeele, Family Process, 2024, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11833421/.)

Cancer patients do better married. The Dana-Farber study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2013 found married patients diagnosed at an earlier stage, when cancer is often more successfully treated, and more likely to receive the appropriate treatment (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 2013, at https://www.dana-farber.org/newsroom/news-releases/2013/marriage-associated-with-better-cancer-outcomes-study-finds.) A 2022 systematic review in Cancer Medicine reached the same conclusion. Unmarried patients were significantly more likely to die, of any cause and of cancer, and divorced and separated men were the most vulnerable group (Cancer Medicine, 2022, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9883406/.)

The heart evidence agrees. The largest analysis of its kind - 3.5 million Americans, presented at the American College of Cardiology in 2014 - found married people 5 per cent less likely to have any vascular disease, with the advantage largest among those aged 50 and younger at 12 per cent (American College of Cardiology, 2014, at https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2014/03/28/09/55/Alviar-Marital-Status.)

The official record shows women far safer from domestic abuse when they're married or in a civil partnership than when they live with a partner they haven't married. In the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year to March 2025, 5.1 per cent of married or civil-partnered women had suffered domestic abuse in the previous year, against 10.2 per cent of cohabiting women and 14.1 per cent of single women, and among men the figures were 3.7, 7.4 and 10.4 per cent. The Office for National Statistics reports a "significantly lower proportion" of abuse among people who were married or in a civil partnership than among those who were cohabiting, single, separated or divorced (Office for National Statistics, Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: year ending March 2025, 26 November 2025, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025, with the appendix tables, Table 4, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/domesticabuseprevalenceandvictimcharacteristicsappendixtables/yearendingmarch2025.)

The official figures on wellbeing point the same way. The ONS Personal Well-being Survey for April 2022 to March 2023 found self-reported health and marital status the two largest contributors to life satisfaction. Only 3.3 per cent of people who were married or in a civil partnership reported low life satisfaction, against 6.7 per cent of single adults, 9.2 per cent of the divorced and 12 per cent of the separated (Office for National Statistics, Measuring national well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringnationalwellbeing/april2022tomarch2023.) The ONS's 2018 study of loneliness found people who were married or in a civil partnership significantly less likely to report feeling lonely than any other marital group, with the single and widowed at particular risk (Office for National Statistics, April 2018, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/lonelinesswhatcharacteristicsandcircumstancesareassociatedwithfeelinglonely/2018-04-10.) The newest official figures, from Northern Ireland, put numbers on it. In 2024/25, 9.1 per cent of married or civil-partnered adults there said they felt lonely at least some of the time, against 23.0 per cent of the single, 33.9 per cent of the divorced and 40.3 per cent of the widowed. They also reported the highest life satisfaction of any group, 8.1 out of 10 against 7.4 for the single (Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency and The Executive Office, Individual Wellbeing in Northern Ireland 2024/25, data tables, 21 January 2026, at https://www.executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2026-01/individual-wellbeing-ni-202425-data-tables.xlsx.) The Centre for Social Justice's analysis of 27,126 British adults found cohabiting adults just over half as likely to be lonely as single adults, and married people less likely still (Centre for Social Justice, Lonely Nation, May 2024, at https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/CSJ-Lonely_Nation.pdf.)

Suicide tells the same story. Following 35 million adults in England and Wales over the decade to 2021, the Office for National Statistics found the lowest suicide rates among the married or civil-partnered, for men and women alike (Office for National Statistics, Sociodemographic inequalities in suicides in England and Wales: 2011 to 2021, 6 March 2023, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthinequalities/bulletins/sociodemographicinequalitiesinsuicidesinenglandandwales/2011to2021.)

Then there's happiness itself. Sam Peltzman's analysis of America's long-running General Social Survey, The Anatomy of Marital Happiness, found a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents, which he calls the marital premium (Peltzman, The Anatomy of Marital Happiness, University of Chicago, at https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1038/.) Gallup's polling found 61 per cent of married American adults aged 25 to 50 thriving in 2023, against 45 per cent of those who had never married, a gap that has run between 10 and 24 points in every year since 2009 (Gallup, 2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/642590/married-americans-thriving-higher-rates-unmarried-adults.aspx.) That's American data, but the official UK figures above show the same pattern.

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THE ECONOMIC CASE

The retreat from marriage has gone furthest among the poor. The Marriage Foundation's March 2025 analysis found 71 per cent of parents of newborns in the highest earning group were married, against 35 per cent in the lowest earning classified group - a 36 percentage point gap, rising to as much as 51 points against the unclassified residual group, and double the gap present in 1988 (Marriage Foundation, The Marriage Gap, March 2025, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/MF-paper-Marriage-gap-March-2025.pdf.) The Institute for Fiscal Studies found that men from low-income households were almost twice as likely as men from high-income backgrounds never to have married, and that the partners of men from richer backgrounds earned 73 per cent more than the partners of men from poorer families (Institute for Fiscal Studies, August 2017, at https://ifs.org.uk/news/men-poor-backgrounds-have-lower-earnings-and-are-twice-likely-be-single-those-rich-families.)

The American wealth data shows what's at stake for a household. Among American men aged 51 to 60, median financial assets for the stably married stand at $399,000, against $180,000 for remarried men and just $12,800 for single men, with similar gaps for women. Household income shows the same pattern. It's around $90,000 for married women, against $67,500 for cohabiting women and $38,000 for single women, with similar gaps for men (figures assembled in Brad Wilcox's Get Married, set out in the Independent Review's assessment, 2024, at https://www.independent.org/tir/2024-fall/get-married/.)

Children of lone parents are far more likely to be poor. In 2024/25, 27 per cent of children in single-parent families were in deep material poverty - going without at least four of 13 essentials for lack of money - three times the rate for children in couple families, and 41 per cent were in relative poverty after housing costs (Department for Work and Pensions, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty, monitoring and evaluation baseline report, Annex A, updated 5 August 2026, at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/our-children-our-future-tackling-child-poverty-monitoring-and-evaluation-baseline-report/annex-a-vulnerable-and-high-risk-groups.) Lone parents were 12 times more likely to be on income support and eight times more likely to live in a workless household than couple parents (Marriage Foundation, Why Marriage Must Be Central to Any Policy on Poverty, March 2021, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/why-marriage-must-be-central-to-any-policy-on-poverty/.) The Family Resources Survey for 2023-24 found 34 per cent of lone parents had no savings at all, with a further 25 per cent holding less than £100 (Department for Work and Pensions, published January 2026, at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2023-to-2024/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2023-to-2024.)

The American evidence puts the same point the other way round. Following the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to ages 32 to 38, Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox found that young adults who had finished high school, worked full time and married before having children - in that order - were almost never poor. Of them, 97 per cent weren't, against 52 per cent poor among those who had missed all three steps, and the odds of poverty were more than 10 times higher for those who missed all three after allowing for race and ethnicity, education, family income, family structure and test scores. The sequence worked for those who started with least. Only 6 per cent of those raised in lower-income families and 5 per cent of those raised without both biological parents were poor if they had followed it (Wang and Wilcox, The Power of the Success Sequence for Disadvantaged Young Adults, Institute for Family Studies and American Enterprise Institute, May 2022, at https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/successsequencedisadvantagedya-final.pdf.) The Institute for Family Studies counts work as perhaps the most influential of the three steps, but adds that it's the hope of marriage and children that energises and sustains the work (Hawkins and Huber, Advancing the Path to Success, Institute for Family Studies, April 2026, at https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/final-ifs-successsequenceandstatesreport-april2026.pdf.)

Marriage changes men's behaviour, and the best test of that comes from a study that followed the same men for 50 years. Robert Sampson and John Laub, with Christopher Wimer, tracked 440 Boston men - all of them delinquent as boys in the 1940s - year by year from 17 to 32, and 52 of them to 70, comparing each man's offending in the years he was married with his own offending in the years he wasn't, after allowing for 20 measures of his childhood and a dozen of his adult circumstances. Being married cut a man's rate of offending by about 43 per cent, and by 36 per cent at the most cautious end of the estimate. The authors' headline across all their models is about 35 per cent (Sampson, Laub and Wimer, Does Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach to Within-Individual Causal Effects, Criminology, 2006, DOI 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2006.00055.x, the full paper archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240521204657id_/https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sampson/files/2006_criminology_laubwimer.pdf.) The sample is American, male and historical, and the authors accept that no study of this kind can rule out every difference between men that the records missed, but they judge that any such difference would have to be implausibly large to overturn the result.

Then there's the bill. The Relationships Foundation's Cost of Family Failure Index puts the cost of family failure to the taxpayer at £51 billion a year, up from £37 billion when the exercise began (Relationships Foundation, 2018 update, the most recent published, at https://relationshipsfoundation.org/publications/pressreleases/cost-family-failure-2018-update/.) America has done the same sum, and done it cautiously. A 2008 study led by the economist Benjamin Scafidi for the Institute for American Values put the cost of divorce and unmarried childbearing to American taxpayers at a minimum of $112 billion a year - more than a trillion dollars a decade. The study counted only what the poverty caused by family breakdown costs in lost tax and in anti-poverty, criminal-justice and school-nutrition spending, and left public education out altogether. Its authors calculate that even a 1 per cent fall in family fragmentation would save $1.12 billion a year (Scafidi, The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing, 2008, at https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Taxpayer-Costs-of-Divorce.pdf.) Against that, the British state's main recognition of marriage in the income-tax system is the Marriage Allowance - a transfer of £1,260 of personal allowance worth up to £252 a year to a basic-rate couple (HM Revenue and Customs, Marriage Allowance, at https://www.gov.uk/marriage-allowance.) So a married couple gets at most £252 a year, against a £51 billion bill for family breakdown.

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THE STABILITY GAP IS THE MECHANISM

Why does one institution do so much? For children, the answer is stability. Marriage is where a man and a woman commit themselves in public, to each other alone and for life, and bind themselves in law and in daily life to one another and to the children they have together. Only the marriage of a man and a woman can give a child his or her own mother and father, bound to each other and to the child. Every other family arrangement loosens that bond, but marriage holds it. For husbands and wives themselves, marriage also does good directly, to their health, their happiness and their conduct, as other studies on this page show.

Unmarried cohabiting parents accounted for around 19 per cent of couples with children but roughly half of all family breakdown (Marriage Foundation briefing note, December 2013, from Understanding Society data for 2009 to 2012, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/MF-briefing-note-proportion-of-family-breakdown-from-cohabitation-v2.pdf.) Divorce is no longer the main cause of family breakdown. Divorce rates have been falling for decades, while cohabiting relationships remain substantially riskier than marriage.

The pattern is international. Across Europe, the Institute for Family Studies found cohabiting relationships three to five times more likely to dissolve than marriages. In not a single country studied did the cohabiting risk of a break-up fall below twice the divorce risk of the married (Institute for Family Studies, at https://ifstudies.org/blog/cohabitation-marriage-and-union-instability-in-europe/.)

Nor do cohabiting parents behave like married ones. In a study of 15 countries, mothers who stayed cohabiting after a first birth were significantly less likely than married mothers to conceive a second child in 11 of them - between 29 and 55 per cent less likely, after allowing for how long the union had lasted and whether it broke up. In Britain the odds were 45 per cent lower. Where couples married after the birth, the married pattern returned. It's the act of marrying, the author concludes, not its timing, and cohabitation "should not be considered an alternative to marriage or indistinguishable from marriage" (Perelli-Harris, European Journal of Population, 2014, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4221046/.)

And it isn't true, as is often claimed, that half of all marriages end in divorce. Of the couples who married in 2015, just 16.3 per cent had divorced by their 10th anniversary, fewer than the 24.7 per cent of the couples who married in 1995, and the ONS says that for more recent couples the long rise in divorce "appears to be reversing". So 83.7 per cent of the marriages made in 2015 hadn't ended in divorce at 10 years. No group of couples married in any one year since 1963 has reached half. The highest, the couples of 1987, stood at 45.3 per cent after 38 years (Office for National Statistics, Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales: 2024 and 2025, 23 September 2026, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2024and2025, and its workbook, Table 9b, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/datasets/divorcesanddissolutionsinenglandandwales.) Marriage is far more resilient than popular culture suggests.

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DOES MARRIAGE CAUSE ANY OF THIS?

The objection - that "married couples were just better off anyway" - is partly right. People who marry are on average older, better educated and better off, and some of the marriage advantage reflects who marries rather than what marrying does. The Institute for Fiscal Studies made the strongest version of this case in its 2010 Briefing Note 107 (at https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn107.pdf.) In the raw data, 26 per cent of cohabiting parents had split up for a month or more by their child's third birthday, against 7 per cent of married parents, a gap the IFS puts at 19.7 percentage points. Allowing for things marriage can't change, such as the child's sex and date of birth and the mother's ethnicity, religion and family background, the IFS found the gap "slightly reduced, but remains large and statistically significant", at 16.7 points. Allowing as well for the couple's education, income, housing and relationship quality, it fell to 2.1 points by the third birthday, and by the fifth it was no longer statistically significant. But the IFS itself warned that marriage may change some of those things, so that allowing for them risks wrongly removing some of marriage's own benefits. The IFS's own warning begins the answer to the objection, and the twin and sibling studies and the June 2026 re-analysis below complete it.

The IFS's own companion study shows why the controls can't settle it. Following the same cohort to age three, Alissa Goodman and Ellen Greaves found more social and emotional difficulties among children born to cohabiting parents than among those born to married parents. The gap survived the parents' education, income and housing, and disappeared only once the parents' relationship quality at nine months was allowed for. Children whose cohabiting parents had split up fared worst. The authors warn that "if marriage itself actually causes higher income, better relationship quality or better parenting practices, then controlling for these indirect effects will lead to an understatement of the possible benefits of marriage" (Goodman and Greaves, Cohabitation, marriage and child outcomes, IFS Commentary C114, April 2010, at https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/comm114.pdf.)

The best modern studies test what marriage itself does. Twin and sibling studies allow for genes and upbringing. Among 1,613 pairs of young American twins and siblings, Erin Horn and colleagues found that being married or living with a partner protected against depression, thoughts of suicide and drinking, and that marriage protected against crime in a way that living together didn't. Identical twins who were cohabiting were 67 per cent more likely than their married co-twins to have broken the law in the previous year. The authors conclude that marriage-like relationships "apparently are (despite age, gender, ethnicity, genes, and rearing environment) causally protective against internalizing and externalizing problems". On physical health in early adulthood they found the difference was down to who marries, and they note that the possible physical health benefits of marriage "may accrue over the life course" (Horn, Xu, Beam, Turkheimer and Emery, Journal of Family Psychology, 2013, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3645280/.) In Minnesota, among 289 pairs of male twins followed from 17 to 29, the married twin engaged in less antisocial behaviour after his wedding than his unmarried identical co-twin, even allowing for how he had behaved before. Men less given to antisocial behaviour were more likely to marry in the first place, the authors found, but "this tendency to refrain from antisocial behavior appears to be accentuated by the state of marriage" (Burt, Donnellan, Humbad, Hicks, McGue and Iacono, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2010, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21135331/.)

The same test has been run on children. Paul Amato, whose meta-analyses of 92 studies in 1991 and 67 more in 2001 found children of divorce scoring lower on attainment, conduct and adjustment, went on to use each child as his or her own control - comparing the same American children before and after their parents' divorce, which strips out everything fixed about the family, including its income, its class and the quality of the marriage beforehand. Divorce still cost them. Reading and maths scores fell among the eighth-graders, and anxiety and low mood rose among the kindergarten children. The effects are small, the authors say, and for most children the commonest outcome was no change, but they judged the evidence that the effect is causal reasonably strong (Amato and Anthony, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2014, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3956656/.)

A sibling study on a far larger scale points the same way. Using American tax and Census records, Andrew Johnston, Maggie Jones and Nolan Pope followed 4.5 million children born between 1988 and 1993 to married parents who later divorced, and compared brothers and sisters who lived through the same divorce at different ages. Divorce early in a child's life cut his or her adult earnings by 9 to 13 per cent and raised the risk of a teenage birth by roughly 60 per cent, of imprisonment by about 40 per cent and of early death by about 45 per cent (Johnston, Jones and Pope, NBER Working Paper 33776, May 2025, at https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33776/w33776.pdf.) Norway's registers say the same about school. Among 197,638 Norwegian children, those whose parents' marriage broke up were still 6 to 13 percentage points less likely to get through the main stages of secondary school, even after allowing for differences between the mothers that never show up in the records - half the raw gap, and large, the authors stress, "even in a country like Norway where there is far less economic inequality" (Steele, Sigle-Rushton and Kravdal, Demography, 2009, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831341/.) And the United Kingdom has its own within-child test. Following 6,245 Millennium Cohort children who were living with both parents at three, Emla Fitzsimons and Aase Villadsen compared each child with himself or herself before and after a father left. When the departure came later in childhood, between the ages of 7 and 14, emotional problems rose for boys and girls, and behaviour problems for boys (Fitzsimons and Villadsen, Social Science and Medicine, 2019, at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30660390/.)

Among older adults, a 2018 study in the European Economic Review found a health difference of around five percentage points at ages 55 to 59, even allowing for differences in people's underlying health that a survey would be unlikely to record. Its authors took this as evidence that there might be a protective effect of marriage at older ages (at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597938/.)

The evidence on money and marriage has its own twin study. Kate Antonovics and Robert Town, writing in the American Economic Review in 2004, compared married identical twins with their unmarried co-twins. The estimated wage premium of marriage didn't fall when each married twin was compared with his own unmarried brother but rose, from 19 per cent when the men were compared in the ordinary way to approximately 26 per cent between twins, and the authors concluded that little, if any, of the premium is due to more productive men being more likely to marry (Antonovics and Town, American Economic Review, 2004, at https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/2cc7b4bf-4546-4f5f-950c-e92872b17898/content.)

The psychologist Bella DePaulo has spent two decades arguing that the benefits of marriage are a myth, under headings such as "Debunking the myth that married people live longer" and "On getting married and (not) getting happier" (DePaulo, at https://belladepaulo.com/2023/10/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-benefits-of-marrying-is-wrong-the-evidence/.) The evidence on this page says she's wrong on both counts. The Harvard nurses who married were 35 per cent less likely to have died 20 years on, and the next paragraph shows people growing happier when they marry. Her deeper charge is selection, because people can't be randomly assigned to marry, and the twin, sibling and within-family studies above exist to meet it. They find marriage itself protecting adults against depression and crime, and divorce itself harming children's schooling, earnings and health - on some outcomes by less than the simple comparisons show, but by real amounts that selection doesn't explain away.

The evidence on marriage and happiness has been put through the same test. Since 2006, the General Social Survey has followed some of its respondents for two and four years, so it can watch what happens to the same person's happiness when he or she marries, divorces or is widowed. Lyman Stone's analysis of those panels found that getting married significantly raised happiness within two years - by 0.05 to 0.1 on the survey's three-point scale, about the size of the change a decade of ageing makes. A broadly similar (but less precise) estimate was found at four years, while a separate model that compares each person only with themselves found larger effects still. Divorce and widowhood lowered the happiness score. The panels are small and the follow-up short, Stone says, and the family-change estimates are imprecise. But spending more evenings with friends, even many more, changed nothing (Stone, Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?, Institute for Family Studies, 23 December 2022, at https://ifstudies.org/blog/number-6-in-2022-does-getting-married-really-make-you-happier.) If leaving a marriage makes people less happy, he observes, being in it was part of the happiness.

Then, in June 2026, the selection argument was tested on its own data. The Institute for Fiscal Studies' analyses had used only the three quarters of parents who answered every question, the Marriage Foundation found. Filling in the missing answers by a standard statistical method and following the families to the child's 14th birthday, the Foundation found about a quarter of the gap between parents married and cohabiting at the birth left unexplained by 27 measured differences between them. Between parents who married at any point and parents who never married, between half and two thirds of the gap was left unexplained. The Foundation reads that as evidence that marriage itself, not just the kind of people who marry, helps hold couples together (Marriage Foundation, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, June 2026, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-The-Timing-of-Marriage_digital-1.pdf.) The question is not closed - no single re-analysis closes it. But for years the selection verdict was assumed to rest on the full weight of the data, and it rested on three quarters of it.

For families and for policy, the outcome of the selection argument changes little. Whether marriage gathers committed people or makes people more committed, it's where stable families are found, and public policy should back it.

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PEOPLE STILL WANT IT

Britons haven't stopped wanting marriage. Among unmarried under-30s in a relationship, 86 per cent of women and 80 per cent of men said in 2021 that they would like to get married at some point (OnePoll survey of 2,000 young adults for the Marriage Foundation, May 2021, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/tiktok-generation-say-i-want-to-get-married/, reported in the Centre for Social Justice's I Do? of February 2026, at https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CSJ-I_Do.pdf.) Three quarters of Gen Z adults want to get married (75 per cent), according to an Opinium survey of 2,000 Gen Z adults aged 18 to 27 (Charles Russell Speechlys, September 2025, at https://www.charlesrussellspeechlys.com/en/insights/expert-insights/private-client/2025/gen-z-and-milestone-planning/.) Yet on current trends only 58 per cent of Gen Z women and 56 per cent of Gen Z men in England and Wales will ever marry (Marriage Foundation analysis of ONS data, December 2024, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-collapse-of-marriage-among-gen-z/.) The gap between what a generation wants and what it will get is the gap the Coalition for Marriage exists to close.

Marriage rewards the perseverance it asks for. Research by Linda Waite and colleagues found that almost two thirds of unhappy spouses who stuck with their marriage were happily married five years later (Does Divorce Make People Happy?, Institute for American Values, 2002, at https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/UnhappyMarriages.pdf.) Among those who had rated their marriages very unhappy, 78 per cent were happily married five years on. The same study found that unhappy spouses who divorced and remarried were, on average, no happier than those who stayed. And in the study's focus groups, many marriages that were now happy had come through years of unhappiness over things as serious as alcoholism and infidelity. This finding is about perseverance through difficulty. It is not a counsel to remain in danger - where a marriage involves abuse, separation may be right and necessary.

Spouses who hold marriage to be for life are happier in it. In a 2026 survey of 3,125 married Americans aged 18 to 54, husbands and wives who completely agreed that "Marriage is a permanent bond; thus, divorce is not acceptable except in extreme cases (e.g., domestic violence)" had 1.85 times the odds of being highly satisfied in their marriage, net of education, race, age and sex. Churchgoing Catholics and Protestants were the most happily married of any group - 79 and 74 per cent very or extremely happy, against 66 per cent of the non-religious (Dell'Isola, Wilcox, Bailey and Lankes Smith, The Devout Difference, Institute for Family Studies, September 2026, at https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-report-the-devout-difference-september2026.pdf.)

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WHAT WE BELIEVE

Marriage is the voluntary, exclusive, lifelong union of one man and one woman - the gold standard for families and society. That conviction rests first on what marriage is, the one union that can give a child his or her own mother and father, bound to each other for life. The evidence on this page is why the Coalition for Marriage holds it with confidence rather than nostalgia. No other relationship structure consistently matches what marriage does for the family inside it, or for the country around it.

The studies best able to tell cause from coincidence, following twins, siblings and the same people through time, find that marriage itself makes adults happier and less likely to be depressed or to break the law, and that the break-up of their parents' marriage harms children. The retreat from marriage has fallen hardest on the poorest families, who stood to gain the most from it, and family breakdown leaves the taxpayer a bill of £51 billion a year.

So we ask policymakers for three things. Remove the couple penalty in the welfare system, which can leave the poorest parents better off living apart than married. Invest in marriage preparation and support. And say plainly, in public, that marriage matters, because the evidence shows it does. The wish to marry is still there among the young. What Britain's families need is a state that stops treating the gold standard as a lifestyle choice, and parents and churches willing to hand on what they know.

Join us. Receive the Coalition for Marriage briefings at https://www.c4m.org.uk/subscribe and support the campaign at https://www.c4m.org.uk/donate.

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RELATED PAGES ON C4M.ORG.UK

https://www.c4m.org.uk/marriage-support/marriage-facts-and-figures - the key statistics on marriage in the United Kingdom

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KEY SOURCES

Marriage Foundation, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution (with the Centre for Social Justice), June 2026. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/ Marriage Foundation, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, the full report, June 2026. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/PhD-The-Timing-of-Marriage_digital-1.pdf Marriage Foundation, Source of Family Breakdown. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/ Marriage Foundation, Married Poor More Stable than Unmarried Rich, May 2022. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/married-poor-more-stable-than-unmarried-rich/ Marriage Foundation, The Marriage Gap, March 2025. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/MF-paper-Marriage-gap-March-2025.pdf Marriage Foundation, Marriage and GCSE results, June 2023. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MF-report-Families-and-Education.pdf Goodman, A. and Greaves, E., Cohabitation, Marriage and Relationship Stability, IFS Briefing Note BN107, 2010. https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn107.pdf Goodman, A. and Greaves, E., Cohabitation, marriage and child outcomes, IFS Commentary C114, April 2010. https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/comm114.pdf Kiernan, K. and Mensah, F., Parent relationships and child wellbeing, Millennium Cohort Study Briefing 1, Centre for Longitudinal Studies, 2010. https://cls.ucl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/01_briefing_web.pdf Centre for Social Justice, I Do?, February 2026. https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CSJ-I_Do.pdf Centre for Social Justice, Family Structure Still Matters, 2020. https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/new-report-family-structure-still-matters Centre for Social Justice, Lonely Nation, May 2024. https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/CSJ-Lonely_Nation.pdf NHS Digital, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2017: Predictors of mental disorders, 26 March 2019. https://files.digital.nhs.uk/85/7FFC57/MHCYP%202017%20Predictors.pdf NHS England, Mental Health of Children and Young People in England, 2023: wave 4 follow up to the 2017 survey, data tables, 21 November 2023. https://files.digital.nhs.uk/2D/D88231/mhcyp_2023_tab.xlsx Goisis, A., Ozcan, B. and Sigle, W., Child outcomes after parental separation: variations by contact and court involvement, London School of Economics, Ministry of Justice Analytical Series, 2016. https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/25543/1/child-outcomes-after-parental-separation.pdf McLanahan, S. and Sandefur, G., Growing Up With a Single Parent, Harvard University Press, 1994. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674364080 Wilcox, B., Wang, W. and ElHage, A., Life Without Father: Less College, Less Work, and More Prison for Young Men Growing Up Without Their Biological Father, Institute for Family Studies, 17 June 2022. https://ifstudies.org/blog/life-without-father-less-college-less-work-and-more-prison-for-young-men-growing-up-without-their-biological-father Weitoft, G.R., Hjern, A., Haglund, B. and Rosén, M., Mortality, severe morbidity, and injury in children living with single parents in Sweden: a population-based study, The Lancet, 2003. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12559862/ Auersperg, F., Vlasak, T., Ponocny, I. and Barth, A., Long-term effects of parental divorce on mental health - A meta-analysis, Journal of Psychiatric Research, 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31622869/ Kearney, M.S., Levine, P.B. and Barson, A.Q., The Evolving Marriage Gap in Children's Outcomes: Family Structure and Young Adult Outcomes Revisited, NBER Working Paper 35765, September 2026. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35765/w35765.pdf Updated systematic review and meta-analysis, marital status and cardiovascular, cancer and all-cause mortality, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12612516/ Grundy, E.M.D. and Tomassini, C., Marital history, health and mortality among older men and women in England and Wales, BMC Public Health, 2010. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2954998/ Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Marital Status and Survival in Patients With Cancer, Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2013. https://www.dana-farber.org/newsroom/news-releases/2013/marriage-associated-with-better-cancer-outcomes-study-finds Cancer Medicine, marital status and survival in cancer patients: systematic review and meta-analysis, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9883406/ American College of Cardiology, Marital Status and Cardiovascular Disease in 3.5 Million Patients, 2014. https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2014/03/28/09/55/Alviar-Marital-Status Office for National Statistics, Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: year ending March 2025, 26 November 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2025 Office for National Statistics, Personal Well-being in the UK: April 2022 to March 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/bulletins/measuringnationalwellbeing/april2022tomarch2023 Office for National Statistics, Loneliness - What characteristics and circumstances are associated with feeling lonely, April 2018. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/lonelinesswhatcharacteristicsandcircumstancesareassociatedwithfeelinglonely/2018-04-10 Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency and The Executive Office, Individual Wellbeing in Northern Ireland 2024/25, 21 January 2026. https://www.executiveoffice-ni.gov.uk/publications/individual-wellbeing-northern-ireland-report-202425 Office for National Statistics, Sociodemographic inequalities in suicides in England and Wales: 2011 to 2021, 6 March 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthinequalities/bulletins/sociodemographicinequalitiesinsuicidesinenglandandwales/2011to2021 Office for National Statistics, Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales: 2024 and 2025, 23 September 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2024and2025 Office for National Statistics, Divorces and dissolutions in England and Wales, workbook, 23 September 2026. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/datasets/divorcesanddissolutionsinenglandandwales Office for National Statistics, Marriages in England and Wales, 2023 workbook, Tables 1a and 10a. https://www.ons.gov.uk/file?uri=/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/datasets/marriagesinenglandandwales2013/2023/marriagesworkbook2023.xlsx Office for National Statistics, Families and households in the UK: 2025, workbook, Table 9. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/datasets/familiesandhouseholdsfamiliesandhouseholds Peltzman, S., The Anatomy of Marital Happiness, University of Chicago. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/1038/ Gallup, Married Americans Thriving at Higher Rates than Unmarried Adults, 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/642590/married-americans-thriving-higher-rates-unmarried-adults.aspx Horn, E.E., Xu, Y., Beam, C.R., Turkheimer, E. and Emery, R.E., Accounting for the physical and mental health benefits of entry into marriage: a genetically informed study of selection and causation, Journal of Family Psychology, 2013. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3645280/ Burt, S.A., Donnellan, M.B., Humbad, M.N., Hicks, B.M., McGue, M. and Iacono, W.G., Does marriage inhibit antisocial behavior? An examination of selection vs causation via a longitudinal twin design, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2010. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21135331/ Johnston, A.C., Jones, M.R. and Pope, N.G., Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes, NBER Working Paper 33776, May 2025. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w33776/w33776.pdf Steele, F., Sigle-Rushton, W. and Kravdal, Ø., Consequences of Family Disruption on Children's Educational Outcomes in Norway, Demography, 2009. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831341/ Fitzsimons, E. and Villadsen, A., Father departure and children's mental health: How does timing matter?, Social Science and Medicine, 2019. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30660390/ European Economic Review, Marriage and Health: Selection, Protection, and Assortative Mating, 2018. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597938/ Antonovics, K. and Town, R., Are All the Good Men Married? Uncovering the Sources of the Marital Wage Premium, American Economic Review, 2004. https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/2cc7b4bf-4546-4f5f-950c-e92872b17898/content DePaulo, B., The Evidence collection. https://belladepaulo.com/2023/10/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-benefits-of-marrying-is-wrong-the-evidence/ Wilcox, B., Get Married, reviewed in the Independent Review, 2024. https://www.independent.org/tir/2024-fall/get-married/ Relationships Foundation, Cost of Family Failure Index, 2018 update. https://relationshipsfoundation.org/publications/pressreleases/cost-family-failure-2018-update/ Department for Work and Pensions, Our Children, Our Future: Tackling Child Poverty, monitoring and evaluation baseline report, Annex A: Vulnerable and high-risk groups, updated 5 August 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/our-children-our-future-tackling-child-poverty-monitoring-and-evaluation-baseline-report/annex-a-vulnerable-and-high-risk-groups Department for Work and Pensions, Family Resources Survey: Financial Year 2023 to 2024, January 2026. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2023-to-2024/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2023-to-2024 HM Revenue and Customs, Marriage Allowance. https://www.gov.uk/marriage-allowance Waite, L. and colleagues, Does Divorce Make People Happy?, Institute for American Values, 2002. https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/UnhappyMarriages.pdf Dell'Isola, R., Wilcox, B., Bailey, G. and Lankes Smith, J., The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans, Institute for Family Studies, September 2026. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-report-the-devout-difference-september2026.pdf Wang, W. and Wilcox, W.B., The Power of the Success Sequence for Disadvantaged Young Adults, Institute for Family Studies and American Enterprise Institute, May 2022. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/successsequencedisadvantagedya-final.pdf Institute for Family Studies, Fact Sheet: The Power of the Success Sequence, April 2025. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/success_sequence/finalsuccesssequencefactsheet.pdf Hawkins, A.J. and Huber, C., Advancing the Path to Success: How States Can Teach the Success Sequence to Youth, Institute for Family Studies, April 2026. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/final-ifs-successsequenceandstatesreport-april2026.pdf Okafor, C.N. and colleagues, A cross-national analysis of demographic variation in self-rated mental health across 22 countries, Communications Medicine, 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12313904/ Wang, W. and Erickson, J., More Married Mothers of Young Children Are Working Full Time, Institute for Family Studies, November 2025. https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/ifs-womenwork-nov2025-final2.pdf Chen, Y., Mathur, M.B., Case, B.W. and VanderWeele, T.J., Marital transitions during earlier adulthood and subsequent health and well-being in mid- to late-life among female nurses, Global Epidemiology, 2023. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10445961/ de la Rosa, P.A. and colleagues, Longitudinal associations of spousal support and strain with health and well-being, Family Process, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11833421/ Sedlak, A.J. and colleagues, Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-4): Report to Congress, January 2010. https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/opre/nis4_report_congress_full_pdf_jan2010.pdf Daly, M. and Wilson, M., Child Abuse and Other Risks of Not Living with Both Parents, Ethology and Sociobiology, 1985. https://www.martindaly.ca/uploads/2/3/7/0/23707972/daly___wilson_1985_child_abuse.pdf Chetty, R., Friedman, J.N., Hendren, N., Jones, M.R. and Porter, S.R., The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility, January 2025 revision. https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/atlas_paper.pdf Amato, P.R. and Anthony, C.J., Estimating the Effects of Parental Divorce and Death With Fixed Effects Models, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2014. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3956656/ Perelli-Harris, B., How Similar are Cohabiting and Married Parents? Second Conception Risks by Union Type in the United States and Across Europe, European Journal of Population, 2014. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4221046/ Stone, L., Does Getting Married Really Make You Happier?, Institute for Family Studies, 2022. https://ifstudies.org/blog/number-6-in-2022-does-getting-married-really-make-you-happier Sampson, R.J., Laub, J.H. and Wimer, C., Does Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Approach to Within-Individual Causal Effects, Criminology 44(3), 2006, DOI 10.1111/j.1745-9125.2006.00055.x. https://web.archive.org/web/20240521204657id_/https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sampson/files/2006_criminology_laubwimer.pdf Scafidi, B., The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing, Institute for American Values, 2008. https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-Taxpayer-Costs-of-Divorce.pdf

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Latest Resources

Our responses to consultations

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Write to your MP about marriage

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Marriage courses

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Marriage in the UK - Facts and Figures

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Evidence of the Benefits of Marriage

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