ONS shows 83.7% marriage success rate
Here’s news worth talking about. Last week the Office for National Statistics showed that 83.7 per cent of the couples who married in 2015 hadn’t divorced by their tenth wedding anniversary, the best ten-year success rate for more than forty years. For couples marrying today, the outlook is good and getting better. You’ll have been told that half of all marriages end in divorce, but that has never been true. In more than 60 years of official records, not one year’s weddings have reached half. The divorce rate has fallen too, from 14.2 in every 1,000 in 1993 to 8.4 last year.
It’s so plain that even The Guardian has noticed. On Sunday, it asked why couples are divorcing later (even if it framed the story around divorce rather than marriage!). The sociologist Julia Carter of the University of the West of England spoke of marriage as “a kind of refuge, a place of long-term stability and security for couples – and especially for women”.
She’s right. Marriage is the safest place there is for a woman and her children, born and unborn. A married woman is half as likely to suffer domestic abuse as a woman living with a partner she hasn’t married. Children living with their own married mother and father are the least likely to be abused or neglected. In the United States Government’s national study of child abuse, children whose single parent had a live-in partner were more than ten times as likely to be abused. And for a baby not yet born, marriage is safest too. In 2023, almost 38 per cent of conceptions outside marriage or civil partnership ended in abortion, against 12 per cent within it.
Some in the same Guardian piece blamed money, saying couples stay married until they can afford to split one home into two. But early divorce has been falling since the couples who married in the mid-1990s, through boom and bust, long before today’s cost-of-living crisis.
Others say only the surest couples marry now, and later in life, so of course they last. But the Marriage Foundation followed parents across the UK from the birth of their first child. It allowed for the parents’ age, income, education and even how happy they said they were together. Even so, by the child’s fourteenth birthday, the chance of splitting up was 45 per cent for parents who never married, against 26 per cent for those who married before the child was conceived. That’s where family breakdown is happening now, among couples who live together without marrying.
So next time someone tells you half of marriages end in divorce, tell them it has never been true, and that 83.7 per cent of the couples who married in 2015 hadn’t divorced ten years on, the best record in more than forty years. Then please forward this email to friends and family and invite them to join us.
At the Coalition for Marriage, we know that marriage between a man and a woman gives a child the safest, most stable home there is. And married couples are more likely to stay together than couples who live together without marrying. That’s the good news this country needs to hear.