“We don’t know anyone whose marriage hit the skids after just a few years,” Celia said, reflecting on her divorce. “Everyone seemed to cling on to their relationships for as long as they possibly could.”
It took Celia two years to initiate divorce after realising her ۱۲-year marriage wasn’t going anywhere – 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.
“I approached it very methodically,” the AI analyst said. “I 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 ‘eject’.”
It helped, Celia said, that she and Martyn, her former husband, had been in their ۴۰s when they got married.
“Because we were older and wiser, we took the time to try to mend our relationship instead of rushing off to start a new life,” she said. “When that didn’t 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.”
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 ۱۳ years in England and Wales in ۲۰۲۵. The figure for opposite-sex marriages has risen from ۱۲.۷ years in ۲۰۲۳ and a low of ۸.۹ years in ۱۹۸۵.
At the same time, the proportion of couples divorcing during their first decade of marriage has fallen sharply. Among couples who married in ۲۰۱۵, an estimated ۱۶.۳% had divorced by their ۱۰th anniversary, compared with ۲۴.۷% of those who married in ۱۹۹۵.
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.
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: “Divorce may have become legally easier, with the advent of no-fault divorces, but separating one household into two has not.”
She said that the longer a couple stayed together, the more tightly entwined – and harder to untangle – their finances became.
“Every financial aspect of divorce is harder,” she said. “From higher tax and mortgage rates, childcare and school fees – 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 – which may well account for why marriages are lasting longer before divorce.”
Celia said she and Martyn had a number of friends who also broke up after marriages of similar lengths. “It 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.”
The research bears out Celia’s experience. In the US, the Pew Research Center found that the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from ۱۰ years in ۲۰۰۸ to ۱۲ years in ۲۰۲۳.
Germany’s federal statistics office put the average length of marriages ending in divorce at ۱۴.۶ years in ۲۰۲۵. In the Netherlands, the figure was ۱۴.۷ years. Belgium’s statistics office recorded a median of ۱۲.۰۳ years in ۲۰۲۴.
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.
Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law and policy at the University of Exeter, said there was a curious feature of the British figures. “No-fault divorce, introduced in ۲۰۲۲, made the legal route out of marriage more straightforward – but there has been no corresponding rush into divorce,” she said.
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: “Queer families and the law after ‘I do’.”
“Another is that no-fault divorce could allow couples to work through a separation without the acrimony that previously accompanied assigning blame,” he said. “If there is no need to prove fault, there may be less pressure to bring the marriage to an immediate legal end.”
Greg Ceely, the ONS’s head of population life events, emphasised that until more research was done, these all remained hypotheses. “The change can’t definitively be attributed to any one thing – or any number of things – because there are so many social and economic factors that could also affect the trend,” he said.
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 ۲۰۲۲ changes introducing a minimum ۲۰-week period between the start of proceedings and application for a final order.
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.
“I hear people saying that even if their marriage isn’t great, they don’t 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,” she said.
Carter pointed to the fact that women remain overwhelmingly the main instigators of divorce. “So if we’re saying that people are waiting later to get divorce, we’re actually saying that women are waiting longer in order to get divorced. So you’ve got to look at what’s changed for women,” she said.
In the ۱۹۹۰s and ۲۰۰۰s, she said, “society was all about female empowerment, girl power, Sex and the City, and ‘let’s go out and grab our opportunities’. But there’s been a rolling back from that kind of positioning, especially for women, because we’ve been through so many crises since then: economic, environmental, political, jobs.
“I think we can see the impact of that in intimate family lives where there’s an embedding of marriage as a kind of refuge, a place of long-term stability and security for couples – and especially for women,” she said. “That has reignited a reluctance to go through divorce.”
The ONS’s same-sex figures give a different set of questions. The median duration of same-sex marriages ending in divorce was ۷.۵ years for male couples and ۶.۶ years for female couples in ۲۰۲۵. The figures need to be treated cautiously because same-sex marriage was introduced in England and Wales only in ۲۰۱۴, meaning the pool of marriages that could have reached divorce is still relatively young.
But the ONS says the ۶.۶-year figure for female couples is nevertheless the highest recorded since the first same-sex divorces in ۲۰۱۵.
Maine suggested that same-sex couples might have particular reasons for taking marriage seriously. “Marriage equality was something many gay people spent so many years campaigning for very hard,” he said. “Because of that, divorce in the LGBT community sometimes carries an additional sense of having failed not just the relationship but the whole community.”
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.
More than ۹۰% of people in Britain cohabited before marrying, said Perelli-Harris, whose research across ۱۰ European countries found that an increasing proportion of first partnerships were ending before marriage.
“Marriage may therefore be becoming a more selective institution,” she said. “Couples 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.”
