Why Marriage Matters - The Evidence

6th August 2026

This page is the evidence for marriage. It opens with the headline figures - twenty-five numbered claims with their sources, for quoting in a letter, a meeting or a debate - and then argues the case through: what marriage does for children, for health and for household finances, with the strongest objection answered. The statistics on marriage itself - how many, who, at what age, how the numbers have moved - are at https://www.c4m.org.uk/marriage-support/marriage-facts-and-figures.

In brief: By their fourteenth birthday, 46 per cent of British first-born children are no longer living with both natural parents - and most of that breakdown comes from the separation of parents who never married. Marriage is where family stability is concentrated, and the evidence for that runs through every serious national study this country has: cohabiting parents are more than three times as likely to separate as married parents, the children of married parents do better at school and carry fewer emotional difficulties, married adults live longer, report better mental health and are markedly happier, and family breakdown costs the taxpayer an estimated 51 billion pounds a year. A June 2026 re-analysis of the full Millennium Cohort sample found that marriage itself accounts for half or more of the stability gap. This page sets out the evidence, and takes the strongest objection seriously.

ON THIS PAGE

 

THE HEADLINE FIGURES

Twenty-five claims, each with its source, for quoting in a letter, a meeting or a debate. Where a figure can be stated either way round, it is stated the encouraging way round, because that is the way it is true. The argument behind them follows below. These figures are averages, never verdicts on any family.

THE SCALE OF THE RETREAT

  1. In 2023, 231,949 marriages and civil partnerships were formed in England and Wales. The 224,402 marriages among them stand 44 per cent below the 400,000 of 1973 - while the United Kingdom's population has grown by eleven million.12

  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 ONS's marital status estimates, 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. Cohabiting-couple families reached 3.5 million in 2025 - 17.6 per cent of all UK families. Married couples remain 65.3 per cent of the total - roughly two thirds.5

STABILITY - THE HEART OF THE CASE

  1. The Government's own evidence review reports Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study data - 82 per cent of adults aged 16 to 54 who were married in 1991 were living with the same partner ten years later, against 61 per cent of those cohabiting.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 sixteen 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. Three quarters of parents who married before their first child was conceived had not separated by the child's fourteenth birthday. The probability of separation was 26 per cent for them, against 45 per cent for parents who never married, and marriage itself accounts for half or more of that gap, after 27 statistical controls.9

  5. More than 83 per cent of the couples who married in 2013 had not divorced by their tenth anniversary. The claim that half of marriages end in divorce is a myth: just 16.8 per cent had. And the ONS's own comparison shows the couples who married in 1998 divorced more at the same point - more than one in five (23.6 per cent) within ten years, and 40.7 per cent within twenty-five.10

"MARRIED COUPLES WERE JUST BETTER OFF ANYWAY" - ANSWERED

  1. No. The researchers found the "gap in stability runs across all five income quintiles". Among the very richest parents, 2.9 per cent split up if cohabiting against 1 per cent if married. Among the very poorest, 8.9 per cent 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. A June 2026 analysis of the entire Millennium Cohort sample - 3,324 couples followed for up to fourteen years, carried out with the Centre for Social Justice - found that marriage itself accounts for half or more of the stability gap between married and cohabiting parents.12

CHILDREN

  1. By age 14, 46 per cent of UK children are not 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): 74 per cent of boys and 81 per cent of girls pass 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. Our calculation from the failure rates the study reports - 26 and 19 per cent, 39 and 34, 54 and 37.14

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. The Office for National Statistics finds the greatest suicide risk among divorced men - almost three times more likely to end their lives than men who were married or in a civil partnership.16

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 point17 - and three quarters of all Gen Z adults want to marry too.18 Yet on present trends only 58 per cent of Gen Z women and 56 per cent of Gen Z men ever will.19
THE GOOD NEWS NOBODY PRINTS

  1. Nearly three in four marriages never end in divorce, even after sixty years. Of the couples who married in 1963, 27.1 per cent had divorced by their diamond anniversary in 2023 - so 72.9 per cent had not.10

  2. More than two couples marry for every one that divorces. England and Wales recorded 224,402 marriages in 2023 against 102,678 divorces.1 10

  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 50.5 per cent in 2023 and 52.4 per cent in 2024. Our calculation from the ONS birth registration tables.20

  4. Married people are the most satisfied with their lives. The Office for National Statistics finds that people who are married or in a civil partnership "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, so married men are about twice as likely to be very happy as their unmarried peers. American data - but the ONS figure above shows the same pattern here.22

  6. Across 22 countries, married adults report the best mental health of any group the study tabulates - and Britain sits near the bottom of the table. 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 eleven 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. Descriptive figures, not a controlled comparison.23

  7. Married fathers are the most employed men in America, and have been for fifty 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 were not poor at ages 32 to 38 and 86 per cent had reached at least the middle class - and among those raised without both biological parents who completed it, 95 per cent were not poor. Of those who missed all three steps, 52 per cent were poor. And marrying before having children, after controls 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 - and that on its broader measure, children whose single parent lived with an unmarried partner suffered abuse at more than ten 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. Harvard researchers followed 11,830 American nurses who were unmarried in 1989. Those who married over the next four years were 35 per cent less likely to have died twenty years on than those who did not, after adjustment for their health, habits and circumstances at the start - and any woman who later divorced was still counted on the married side. American data.28

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. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/
  10. Office for National Statistics, Divorces and Dissolutions in England and Wales: 2023, released 2 July 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2023
  11. Marriage Foundation, Married poor more stable than unmarried rich, October 2023. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/married-poor-more-stable-than-unmarried-rich/
  12. The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, research briefing, June 2026. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/
  13. Marriage Foundation, Source of Family Breakdown. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/
  14. Marriage Foundation, Families and Education, May 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, carried 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 UK adults aged 18 to 27, for Charles Russell Speechlys. 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/

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CHILDREN DO BEST WITH MARRIED PARENTS

The central finding first. 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 are not 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 fourteenth birthday, 84 per cent are married and only 16 in every hundred are cohabiting - from the same Marriage Foundation analysis.

A June 2026 re-analysis of the full cohort sample went further. Published by the Marriage Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Social Justice, it followed 3,324 couples for up to 14 years and found that marriage itself accounts for half or more of the stability gap - by the child's fourteenth birthday, 45 per cent of never-married parents had separated against 26 per cent of those married before conception, an effect that survives 27 statistical controls including income, education and ethnicity - Marriage Foundation, The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution, June 2026, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/.

The 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 - and 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, October 2023, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/married-poor-more-stable-than-unmarried-rich/. Money does not explain this gap. Marriage does.

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 - IFS Briefing Note BN107, 2010, at https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn107.pdf. An Institute for Fiscal Studies study by Kathleen Kiernan and colleagues, published in 2022 and cited in the Centre for Social Justice's I Do? report of February 2026, found a 10 per cent chance that married couples split before their child's fifth birthday, against 28 per cent for couples who were cohabiting when the child was born - see https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/CSJ-I_Do.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, Families and Education, June 2023, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/MF-report-Families-and-Education.pdf. The Centre for Social Justice puts the point bluntly - what correlates with exam results in every ethnicity is marriage rates - two in ten children in the poorest white quintile live with married parents, against almost nine in ten in the wealthiest white quintile - reported by the Christian Institute, August 2025, at https://www.christian.org.uk/news/marriage-breakdown-leads-to-poor-gcse-results-warns-think-tank/.

It shows up 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. The report is at https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/new-report-family-structure-still-matters. And the finding is not new. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur's landmark American study found that children whose 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.

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 - while 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 ten times the rate, and 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 forty times as likely to become recorded child-abuse cases as children living with both natural parents, a gap that income, family size and the mother's age at the birth could not 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 twenty million American children, found the share of single-parent households in a neighbourhood among the strongest predictors of whether a poor child rises - a correlation of minus 0.587 - 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.

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THE HEALTH DIVIDEND

Married people live longer. A 2025 updated systematic review and meta-analysis, pooling twelve international cohort studies with 1,785,857 participants, found single people carrying 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 - see 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 among never-married men, long-term widowers and the long-divorced, with health in early old age rising with the share of adult 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 unmarried in 1989, Tyler VanderWeele and colleagues compared those who married over the next four years with those who did not, and counted anyone who later divorced on the married side - a design that loads the dice against marriage. 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 adjustment 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 are careful: healthier women were also more likely to marry, and the sample is nurses, not the nation. But the finding survived the test they set it.

Marriage quality matters as much as marriage itself. Among 7,788 married Americans in their sixties, those with the most supportive spouses were a third less likely to be diagnosed with depression four years later than those with the least, with every outcome adjusted for its own starting value - de la Rosa and VanderWeele, Family Process, 2024, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11833421/. Which is the case for supporting marriages, not only for counting them.

Cancer patients do better married. The Dana-Farber study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology in 2013 found unmarried patients 17 per cent more likely to present with metastatic disease and 53 per cent less likely to receive appropriate therapy - see 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 - being unmarried is associated with significantly worse overall and cancer-specific survival, with divorced and separated men the most vulnerable group - see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9883406/. And it still shows in the newest data. A 2025 Fox Chase Cancer Center study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting found marital status significantly affecting survival in colorectal cancer - ASCO Post, June 2025, at https://ascopost.com/news/june-2025/married-people-may-have-better-colorectal-cancer-outcomes-study-shows/.

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 - see https://www.acc.org/About-ACC/Press-Releases/2014/03/28/09/55/Alviar-Marital-Status.

And the mind. 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 - ONS, 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 - ONS, April 2018, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/wellbeing/articles/lonelinesswhatcharacteristicsandcircumstancesareassociatedwithfeelinglonely/2018-04-10. 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 - CSJ, Lonely Nation, May 2024, at https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/CSJ-Lonely_Nation.pdf.

Then there is 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 - he calls it the marital premium. The paper is 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, per https://news.gallup.com/poll/642590/married-americans-thriving-higher-rates-unmarried-adults.aspx. That is American data - but the ONS figures above show the same pattern holding here.

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THE ECONOMIC CASE

The marriage gap is now an engine of inequality. The Marriage Foundation's March 2025 analysis found 71 per cent of parents of newborns in the highest earning group are 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 of 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 the poorest fifth of families were almost twice as likely never to have married as men from high-income backgrounds, and that the women who married or settled with men from richer backgrounds earned 73 per cent more than those with men from poorer families, compounding household inequality across generations - IFS, 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 is at stake for a household. Among American men aged 51 to 60, median financial assets for the stably married stand at 399,000 dollars, against 180,000 dollars for remarried men and just 12,800 dollars for single men, with similar gaps for women. Household income follows - around 90,000 dollars for married women, against 67,500 dollars for cohabiting women and 38,000 dollars for single women, and the gaps are similar 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/.

Lone parenthood and poverty travel together. Lone parents were 12 times more likely to be on income support and 8 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 pounds - 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: 97 per cent were not, against 52 per cent poor among those who had missed all three steps, and the odds of poverty were more than ten times higher for those who missed all three after controls for race and ethnicity, education, family income, family structure and test scores. The sequence worked for those who started with least: 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 puts work first among the three steps - and adds that it is 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 fifty 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 was not, after allowing for twenty 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 conservative bound 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 say plainly that no study of this kind can rule out every unmeasured difference - but any such difference, they judge, would have to be implausibly large to overturn the result.

Then there is the bill. The Relationships Foundation's Cost of Family Failure Index puts the cost of family failure to the taxpayer at 51 billion pounds a year, up from 37 billion pounds when the exercise began - 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 dollars a year - more than a trillion dollars a decade - counting only the anti-poverty, criminal-justice and school-nutrition spending, and the forgone tax, that follow from the poverty family breakdown causes, and leaving public education out altogether - a measure of what fragmentation costs, its authors say, not a forecast of what any policy would recover. Even so, they calculate, a 1 per cent fall in family fragmentation would save 1.12 billion dollars 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 state's main recognition of marriage in the income-tax system is the Marriage Allowance - a transfer of 1,260 pounds of personal allowance worth up to 252 pounds a year to a basic-rate couple, per HM Revenue and Customs at https://www.gov.uk/marriage-allowance. A 252 pound thank-you, set against a 51 billion pound bill. That is the current state of policy.

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THE STABILITY GAP IS THE MECHANISM

Why does one institution carry so much of the weight? Because marriage is where commitment is declared and witnessed - and the stability that follows is what every other advantage on this page flows through. It is also the institution that binds a child's own mother and father to each other, and to the child, in law and in daily life. Every other family structure loosens that link. Marriage holds it.

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 primary driver. Divorce rates have been falling for decades while cohabiting relationships remain substantially riskier: by the child's fourteenth birthday the probability of separation was 26 per cent for parents who married before conception, against 45 per cent for parents who never married - Marriage Foundation with the Centre for Social Justice, June 2026, at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/.

The pattern is international. The Institute for Family Studies found cohabiting relationships three to five times more likely to dissolve than marriages across Europe - and no country studied in which the cohabiting risk fell below twice the divorce risk of the married - see https://ifstudies.org/blog/cohabitation-marriage-and-union-instability-in-europe/. A Social Trends Institute report across more than 100 countries found marriage associated with greater family stability worldwide - and the UK among the worst countries in the world for family breakdown - as the Christian Institute reported in February 2017 at https://www.christian.org.uk/news/children-better-married-parents-confirms-new-report/.

Nor are cohabiting parents quietly turning into married ones. Across fifteen countries, mothers who stayed cohabiting after a first birth were significantly less likely to conceive a second child than married mothers in eleven of them - between 29 and 55 per cent less likely, after controls for how long the union had lasted and whether it broke up - and in Britain the odds were 45 per cent lower. Where couples married after the birth, the married pattern returned: it is the act of marrying, the author concludes, not the sequence, 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 the common objection to marriage does not survive the numbers. The claim that half of all marriages end in divorce is a myth - of couples who married in 2013, just 16.8 per cent had divorced by their tenth anniversary, a lower share at the same point than those who married in 1998, continuing what the ONS calls a broader pattern of decreasing proportions of marriages ending in divorce within the first ten years. More than 83 per cent of those marriages were still standing at ten years - ONS, Divorces and Dissolutions in England and Wales: 2023, at https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2023. Marriage is far more resilient than popular culture suggests.

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DOES MARRIAGE CAUSE ANY OF THIS?

The objection deserves a fair hearing, because it 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 separated by their child's third birthday against 7 per cent of married parents. Controlling for basics such as the child's gender and birth year, the IFS found the gap "slightly reduced, but remains large and statistically significant". Accounting for the fuller differences in parental characteristics, it was "substantially reduced" - to 2.1 percentage points by the child's third birthday, against 19.7 before any controls at all, and by the child's fifth birthday smaller still and not statistically significant. On the IFS's own numbers the controls take the gap almost to nothing. That is the objection at full strength - and the twin studies and the June 2026 re-analysis below are the answer to it.

The best modern studies are designed to answer exactly this. A landmark 2012 twin study by Burt and colleagues in the Journal of Family Psychology, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3645280/ - comparing identical twins with different marital histories, which strips out genes and upbringing at a stroke - found marriage-like relationships "causally protective against internalising and externalising problems".

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: in the national eighth-grade cohort, reading fell by 0.15 of a standard deviation and maths by 0.13, and in the kindergarten cohort internalising problems rose by 0.3. The effects are small, the authors say, and for most children the commonest outcome was no change; but the evidence that the effect is causal, they judged, is reasonably strong - Amato and Anthony, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2014, at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3956656/.

A 2018 study in the European Economic Review, using grouped fixed-effects models that allow for unobserved differences in innate health, still found a health difference of around five percentage points at ages 55 to 59 - evidence, its authors judged, that there might be a protective effect of marriage at older ages - see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597938/. And Wilson and Oswald, surveying the longitudinal studies across many journals and disciplines, drew the judgement that there is persuasive longitudinal evidence for the health benefits of relationships like marriage - IZA Discussion Paper 1619, 2005, at https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/1619/.

The money evidence has its own twin studies. 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 did not fall within twin pairs but rose, from 19 per cent in the ordinary data to approximately 26 per cent, and the authors concluded that little, if any, of the premium is due to the selection of more productive men into marriage. The paper is at https://repository.upenn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/2cc7b4bf-4546-4f5f-950c-e92872b17898/content. Reviews of the wider wage literature point the same way: almost all the studies that used differencing techniques found "minor support at best" for the selection explanation, and the one exception, which put up to a third of the differential down to selection, attributed its own unusual result to a younger sample - see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043605/.

The strongest dissenting voice deserves naming. The psychologist Bella DePaulo has spent two decades arguing that the benefits of marriage are a myth - her collected critiques run under headings such as "Debunking the myth that married people live longer" and "On getting married and (not) getting happier" - see https://belladepaulo.com/2023/10/everything-you-think-you-know-about-the-benefits-of-marrying-is-wrong-the-evidence/. Her case is that the studies behind claims like those on this page do not show what they are said to show. The strongest form of any such challenge is selection - people cannot be randomly assigned to marry - and twin designs, fixed-effects models and the June 2026 full-sample re-analysis exist precisely to meet it. They reach the same verdict as the simple comparisons.

The happiness evidence 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 - with a broadly similar but less precise estimate at four years, and larger effects still in the model that compares each person only with themselves. Divorce and widowhood lowered it. 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 ground. The Marriage Foundation re-analysis of the full Millennium Cohort sample - correcting earlier analyses that had rested on only three quarters of the sample - found that marriage itself accounts for half or more of the stability gap between married and cohabiting parents, after 27 controls - see https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/the-timing-of-marriage-and-union-dissolution/. 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 remaining argument matters less than it looks. If marriage merely selects committed people, commitment still gathers there. If it changes people, the result is the same. Either way, marriage is where stability is concentrated, and a serious country builds on it.

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PEOPLE STILL WANT IT

Britons have not 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 - a OnePoll survey of 2,000 young adults for the Marriage Foundation at https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/tiktok-generation-say-i-want-to-get-married/, carried 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 - 75 per cent - want to marry, per an Opinium survey of 2,000 people aged 18 to 27 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 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 - Does Divorce Make People Happy?, Institute for American Values, 2002, at https://www.healthymarriageinfo.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/UnhappyMarriages.pdf - found that almost two thirds of unhappy spouses who stuck with their marriage were happily married five years later. Among those who had rated their marriages very unhappy, 78 per cent were. The same study found that unhappy spouses who divorced and remarried were, on average, no happier than those who stayed. And its authors were clear about what these unhappy seasons involved - serious pressures including alcoholism, infidelity, verbal abuse, emotional neglect, depression, illness and work reversals, not trivial discontent. That 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.

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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. The evidence on this page is why the Coalition for Marriage holds that conviction 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.

We do not denigrate anyone. Many people in other family structures lead flourishing lives, and many carry burdens they did not choose. But we serve nobody by pretending the evidence says something it does not. At population level, marriage is associated with better outcomes for adults and substantially better outcomes for children - and with a lower bill for the state. The retreat from marriage has fallen hardest on the poorest families, who stood to gain the most from it.

So we ask policymakers for three things. Remove the couple penalty in the welfare system that punishes the poorest couples for marrying. Invest in marriage preparation and support. And be willing to say in public what the data says in private - marriage matters. The desire for it is alive in the young, and the institution keeps refusing to die. 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, Source of Family Breakdown. https://marriagefoundation.org.uk/research/source-of-family-breakdown/ Marriage Foundation, Married Poor More Stable than Unmarried Rich, October 2023. 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, Families and Education, 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 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 McLanahan, S. and Sandefur, G., Growing Up With a Single Parent, Harvard University Press, 1994. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674364080 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/ ASCO Post, Married People May Have Better Colorectal Cancer Outcomes, June 2025. https://ascopost.com/news/june-2025/married-people-may-have-better-colorectal-cancer-outcomes-study-shows/ 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, 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 Office for National Statistics, Divorces and Dissolutions in England and Wales: 2023. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2023 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 Burt, S.A. and colleagues, Does marriage inhibit antisocial behaviour?, Journal of Family Psychology, 2012. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3645280/ European Economic Review, Marriage and Health: Selection, Protection, and Assortative Mating, 2018. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7597938/ Wilson, C.M. and Oswald, A.J., How Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health?, IZA Discussion Paper 1619, 2005. https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/1619/ 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 Review of the marriage wage premium literature. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043605/ 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, 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 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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