Divorce and marriage

Less than there used to be

IF MARRIAGE has become so unpopular, why are fewer people choosing to leave their spouses? According to the statistics from the Office for National Statistics on February 17th, the number of divorces in England and Wales fell again in 2009, by 6.4% from the previous year. This is the sixth year in a row that they have dropped, leaving the figure-113,949-at its lowest since 1974.
The divorce rate declined too: to 10.5 divorcing people out of 1,000 married ones, its lowest since 1977.  The greatest number of break-ups was among people in their early 40s, the highest rate among those in their late 20s. Just under 100,000 children saw their parents split up, down from almost 150,000 in 1999.

Why are fewer people getting divorced, given all the economic stress and strain around? In part, because of that stress and strain: more redundancies and sagging house prices mean that it is not always possible financially to split into two households, even if you squabble unmercifully in one. The influx of immigrants from more traditional societies has helped, too, keeping divorce rates down and birth rates up. But the real reason is probably the decline of marriage.

Far fewer people than before are getting married, as everyone knows and the chart shows vividly. This suggests that the brave remnant who do choose to enter that uncool estate are pretty committed to it. And the fact that the average age at which people first marry has drifted up-to just over 32 for men and just under 30 for women in 2008, about three years older for both than even a decade ago-may also damp down divorce, as older people, so far at least, have proved less prone to calling it quits.

Statistics offer only the bare skeleton of the story; there are hundreds of thousands of personal reasons why people marry (or don’t) and divorce (or don’t). But they do suggest that attempts to cure social ills by chivvying people into marriage, as the Conservatives now in government have at times talked of doing, are wide of the mark  The more people marry, it could be argued, the higher divorce rates are likely to be.