A new study has challenged decades of academic and policy assumptions about the role of marriage in family stability, arguing that its benefits have been significantly underestimated.
The report, "The Timing of Marriage and Union Dissolution", was produced by the Marriage Foundation in partnership with the Centre for Social Justice and is based on the doctoral research of Dr Harry Benson at the University of Bristol.
The study examines whether lower rates of relationship breakdown often associated with marriage are primarily the result of factors like income, education and age, or whether marriage itself contributes to relationship durability.
According to the report, previous influential studies, including work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), concluded that married couples were more likely to stay together largely because they tended to be older, wealthier and better educated than those who cohabit.
Dr Benson argues that these studies were methodologically flawed and that they substantially underestimated the independent role of marriage.
“My analysis of the entire sample, using improved state-of-the-art methodology, shows that marriage accounts for half or more of the gap in union dissolution,” he writes in the report.
The research uses data sourced from the Millennium Cohort Study, which followed 18,827 children born between 2000 and 2002 in the UK through their early teenage years.
Dr Benson analysed a representative sample of more than 3,300 couples over a 14-year period and controlled for 27 factors, including age, education, income, religion, housing tenure and smoking habits.
The findings suggest that couples who marry before having children experience substantially lower rates of separation than couples who never marry.
By their child’s fourteenth birthday, parents who had never married faced a separation rate almost twice (45%) that of those who had married before their first child was conceived (26%).
Dr Benson suggests this may reflect what commitment theorists describe as “sliding” into marriage under social or family pressure, rather than making a deliberate commitment earlier in the relationship.
Even so, these marriages remained more stable than relationships in which parents never married. Couples who married during pregnancy (34%) or after the birth of a child (23-30%) had considerably lower rates of relationship breakdown than those who remained unmarried (45%).
The report found that relationship instability was highest among cohabiting couples during the first three years of parenthood, with annual separation rates of around 4.1%.
Married parents, by contrast, experienced separation rates of approximately 2.5-2.7% during the same period.
Dr Benson said the findings support the view that marriage itself plays a role in strengthening relationships.
“In short, being married substantially increases the chances that parents stay together, regardless of when marriage occurs, before, during, or after pregnancy, and regardless of socio-economic background,” he wrote in the report.
He added: “This groundbreaking study categorically demonstrates the benefits of marrying, and blows apart decades of Government policy that has consistently downgraded marriage to just another form of relationship like cohabitating.
“It also serves as a rebuke to those politicians who have sneered at the institution and have, through their actions, actively discouraged marriage among the poorest couples with punitive welfare policies and a lack of courage to promote marriage for fear of being seen as old-fashioned or judgmental.”
The study draws on several psychological theories to explain the findings. These include commitment theory, which suggests that marriage solidifies dedication between partners while producing legal, social and emotional boundaries that raise the cost of exit.
The report also references cognitive consistency theory and signal theory, both of which argue that marriage can strengthen commitment by publicly signalling long-term intentions and aligning behaviour with those commitments.
The report places its findings within the context of wider social changes in Britain.
It notes that births outside marriage have risen from around 5% in the early 1960s to nearly half of all births today, while family instability increasingly occurs among cohabiting rather than married couples.
Crucially, most of these non-marital births are jointly registered by cohabiting couples rather than lone mothers, reflecting a structural shift in how families form.
According to the study, these trends have contributed to growing concerns about the social and economic costs associated with family breakdown.
The report argues: “If marriage itself contributes to stability, then policies that are neutral on marriage are not neutral in effect. Reducing social and fiscal barriers to marriage could therefore play a meaningful role in strengthening family stability and reducing the long-run social and economic costs of family breakdown.”
Among its recommendations, the study calls for greater public awareness of the stabilising effects of marriage, reforms to welfare policies that may discourage marriage, and targeted support for lower-income couples.
It emphasises that “policy interventions which encourage timely marriage, through social messaging and targeted fiscal incentives, can strengthen family stability without coercion.”
Dr Benson said that reducing the social and fiscal barriers to marriage “would play a meaningful role in strengthening family stability and reducing the massive social and economic costs of family breakdown”, which he said run into the billions.
“Yet the Government spends as little as £1 helping families stay together for every £6,000 in dealing with the consequences of family breakdown,” he said.
“Even if they only addressed the appalling couple penalty in the benefits system that has actively deterred people from getting married, and stopped spouting the crazy and factually inaccurate mantra that all relationships are the same, and recognised that marriage is the gold standard of relationship types, that would be a step in the right direction.”
The report recommends further research into commitment and relationship outcomes, including the impact on children's wellbeing.
