The Coalition for Marriage (CFM) has welcomed new figures suggesting that married couples are increasingly staying together.
Last week the Office for National Statistics said that 83.7 per cent of couples who married in 2015 were still married as of last year, the highest rate in over four decades. The figures also showed a significant fall in the divorce rate, which in 1993 was 14.2 per 1,000 and last year fell to 8.4.
The CFM dismissed the notion that half of marriages end in divorce, seeing it as an urban myth and noting that in 60 years of official records this has never in fact been true.
Dr Tony Rucinski, Chief Executive of CFM, said, “For couples marrying today, the outlook is good and getting better.”
He added, “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’.”
Rucinski pointed to other figures which show that married women are half as likely as non-married women to be victims of domestic abuse. Official figures from the US also suggest that children are 10 times more likely to be abused if they have a single parent with a live-in partner.
“Some in the same Guardian piece blamed money, saying couples stay married until they can afford to split one home into two," Rucinski added. “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.”
Research from The Marriage Foundation has backed up the view that marriage holds families together. A study of parents in Britain across a range of social and economic backgrounds found that by the 14th birthday of a first child, there was a 45 per cent chance the parents had divorced if they never married, compared to 26 per cent for parents who were married before the conception of the child.
