\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know anyone whose marriage hit the skids after just a few years,\u201d Celia said, reflecting on her divorce. \u201cEveryone seemed to cling on to their relationships for as long as they possibly could.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took Celia two years to initiate divorce after realising her 12-year marriage wasn\u2019t going anywhere \u2013 and the latest figures show this experience is increasingly common, with marriages that end in divorce now lasting longer than at any point since records began.<\/p>\n
\u201cI approached it very methodically,\u201d the AI analyst said. \u201cI knew that women almost always end up financially worse off after divorce, especially where there are children concerned, so I took the time I needed to turbocharge my career before pressing \u2018eject\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
It helped, Celia said, that she and Martyn, her former husband, had been in their 40s when they got married.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause we were older and wiser, we took the time to try to mend our relationship instead of rushing off to start a new life,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen that didn\u2019t work, Martyn was mature enough to know it was best for the children, me and us that he subtly left me alone to get to where I needed to be before we formally called time on the relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released this week, the median length of a marriage before it ends in divorce reached 13 years in England and Wales in 2025. The figure for opposite-sex marriages has risen from 12.7 years in 2023 and a low of 8.9 years in 1985.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the proportion of couples divorcing during their first decade of marriage has fallen sharply. Among couples who married in 2015, an estimated 16.3% had divorced by their 10th anniversary, compared with 24.7% of those who married in 1995.<\/p>\n
The ONS research does not give any answers as to why marriages are ending later. But it does suggest several hypotheses, including that couples may delay the legal end of their relationships until they can afford what comes next.<\/p>\n
Prof Emma Hitchings, the deputy head of the University of Bristol law school, who led the Fair Shares project, a nationally representative study in England and Wales examining how divorcing couples divide their money and property, said: \u201cDivorce may have become legally easier, with the advent of no-fault divorces, but separating one household into two has not.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said that the longer a couple stayed together, the more tightly entwined \u2013 and harder to untangle \u2013 their finances became.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery financial aspect of divorce is harder,\u201d she said. \u201cFrom higher tax and mortgage rates, childcare and school fees \u2013 as well as the general cost of living. Then throw in the cuts to legal aid for almost all private family law proceedings in England and Wales, and you can see why couples need to spend more time trying to calculate how they can feasibly afford to separate \u2013 which may well account for why marriages are lasting longer before divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n
Celia said she and Martyn had a number of friends who also broke up after marriages of similar lengths. \u201cIt was the oddest thing. But we have three groups of friends, across Europe and in the US, who went through divorces after marriages of a decade or more.\u201d<\/p>\n
The research bears out Celia\u2019s experience. In the US, the Pew Research Center found that the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023.<\/p>\n
Germany\u2019s federal statistics office put the average length of marriages ending in divorce at 14.6 years in 2025. In the Netherlands, the figure was 14.7 years. Belgium\u2019s statistics office recorded a median of 12.03 years in 2024.<\/p>\n
The figures are not directly comparable as countries collect and present divorce statistics differently. But the broad pattern of marriages lasting longer before divorce is not solely a British phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law and policy at the University of Exeter, said there was a curious feature of the British figures. \u201cNo-fault divorce, introduced in 2022, made the legal route out of marriage more straightforward \u2013 but there has been no corresponding rush into divorce,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
One possibility was that knowing you could leave made it easier to wait, said Dr Alexander Maine, a senior lecturer at the City law school who leads a research project called: \u201cQueer families and the law after \u2018I do\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnother is that no-fault divorce could allow couples to work through a separation without the acrimony that previously accompanied assigning blame,\u201d he said. \u201cIf there is no need to prove fault, there may be less pressure to bring the marriage to an immediate legal end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greg Ceely, the ONS\u2019s head of population life events, emphasised that until more research was done, these all remained hypotheses. \u201cThe change can\u2019t definitively be attributed to any one thing \u2013 or any number of things \u2013 because there are so many social and economic factors that could also affect the trend,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Certainly, experts find no problem in pointing to other possible reasons for marriages lasting longer before divorce, from disruption to the family courts affecting the timing of divorces in the years around Covid, as well as influencing the duration figures, to the 2022 changes introducing a minimum 20-week period between the start of proceedings and application for a final order.<\/p>\n
Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, who is researching couples living together after divorce or separation, said wider global and environmental uncertainty was also having an impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hear people saying that even if their marriage isn\u2019t great, they don\u2019t want to introduce uncertainty into their homes as well, especially if there are children in the relationship who are having to negotiate this unstable world outside their family homes,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Carter pointed to the fact that women remain overwhelmingly the main instigators of divorce. \u201cSo if we\u2019re saying that people are waiting later to get divorce, we\u2019re actually saying that women are waiting longer in order to get divorced. So you\u2019ve got to look at what\u2019s changed for women,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In the 1990s and 2000s, she said, \u201csociety was all about female empowerment, girl power, Sex and the City, and \u2018let\u2019s go out and grab our opportunities\u2019. But there\u2019s been a rolling back from that kind of positioning, especially for women, because we\u2019ve been through so many crises since then: economic, environmental, political, jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we can see the impact of that in intimate family lives where there\u2019s an embedding of marriage as a kind of refuge, a place of long-term stability and security for couples \u2013 and especially for women,\u201d she said. \u201cThat has reignited a reluctance to go through divorce.\u201d<\/p>\n
The ONS\u2019s same-sex figures give a different set of questions. The median duration of same-sex marriages ending in divorce was 7.5 years for male couples and 6.6 years for female couples in 2025. The figures need to be treated cautiously because same-sex marriage was introduced in England and Wales only in 2014, meaning the pool of marriages that could have reached divorce is still relatively young.<\/p>\n
But the ONS says the 6.6-year figure for female couples is nevertheless the highest recorded since the first same-sex divorces in 2015.<\/p>\n
Maine suggested that same-sex couples might have particular reasons for taking marriage seriously. \u201cMarriage equality was something many gay people spent so many years campaigning for very hard,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause of that, divorce in the LGBT community sometimes carries an additional sense of having failed not just the relationship but the whole community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brienna Perelli-Harris, a professor of demography at the University of Southampton and director of the UK Generations and Gender Survey, suggested a more fundamental change that might underpin the change: the rise of cohabitation.<\/p>\n
More than 90% of people in Britain cohabited before marrying, said Perelli-Harris, whose research across 10 European countries found that an increasing proportion of first partnerships were ending before marriage.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarriage may therefore be becoming a more selective institution,\u201d she said. \u201cCouples who move in together and discover that the relationship does not work can separate without ever marrying. Those who stay together and eventually marry are, my research shows, the couples who are happiest.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWe don\u2019t know anyone whose marriage hit the skids after just a few years,\u201d Celia said, reflecting on her divorce. \u201cEveryone seemed to cling on to their relationships for as long as they possibly could.\u201d It took Celia two years to initiate divorce after realising her 12-year marriage wasn\u2019t going anywhere \u2013 and the latest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52338,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1449,2811,4429,25349,25348,5106,19533],"class_list":{"0":"post-52337","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-career","9":"tag-couples","10":"tag-divorce","11":"tag-divorced","12":"tag-eject","13":"tag-pressed","14":"tag-turbocharged"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}