Marriages now last 13 years before divorce, longest on record, as couples delay splits

Celia waited two years after her marriage had effectively ended before she filed for divorce. She was not alone. New figures from the Office for National Statistics show that marriages ending in divorce in England and Wales now last a median of 13 years—the longest duration since records began. The shift is stark: in 1985, that median was 8.9 years. Among couples who married in 2015, only 16.3% had divorced by their tenth anniversary, compared with 24.7% of those who married in 1995.

Celia, an AI analyst, described her approach as methodical. She knew that women typically emerge from divorce in worse financial positions, especially when children are involved. So she spent years building her career before formally ending her 12-year marriage to Martyn. "I took the time I needed to turbocharge my career before pressing 'eject'," she said. Martyn, she noted, was mature enough to understand that waiting served everyone—the children, her, and him. What struck Celia most was how common this pattern had become among her friends. Across three separate friend groups spanning Europe and the United States, she knew couples who had divorced after marriages of a decade or more. "It was the oddest thing," she said.

The phenomenon is not confined to Britain. In the United States, the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023, according to the Pew Research Center. Germany recorded an average of 14.6 years in 2025. The Netherlands reported 14.7 years. Belgium's figure was 12.03 years in 2024. While these countries measure and report divorce statistics differently, the broad pattern holds: marriages are lasting longer before they formally end.

Experts point to several overlapping explanations, though none can be confirmed as the primary driver. Financial pressure looms large. Professor Emma Hitchings of the University of Bristol law school, who leads the Fair Shares project studying how divorcing couples divide assets, noted that while no-fault divorce—introduced in 2022—made the legal process simpler, the actual separation of one household into two has not become easier. "Every financial aspect of divorce is harder," she said. Higher mortgage and tax rates, childcare costs, school fees, and the general rise in living expenses all factor in. Legal aid cuts for private family law proceedings in England and Wales have compounded the problem. Couples need time to calculate whether they can afford to separate at all.

The 2022 no-fault divorce law itself may play a counterintuitive role. Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law at the University of Exeter, observed that despite making divorce legally more straightforward, there has been no rush to use it. Dr. Alexander Maine, a senior lecturer at City Law School, suggested two possibilities: knowing you can leave might make it easier to wait, or the removal of the need to assign blame could allow couples to work through separation with less acrimony, reducing pressure to end the marriage immediately.

Broader social forces may also be at work. Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, is researching couples who remain together after separation. She hears from people who, despite unhappy marriages, resist introducing further uncertainty into their homes—particularly when children are navigating an unstable world outside the family. Carter also emphasizes that women remain the primary initiators of divorce. "If we're saying that people are waiting later to get divorced, we're actually saying that women are waiting longer," she said. She traces a shift in cultural messaging: the 1990s and 2000s celebrated female empowerment and opportunity-grabbing, but successive crises—economic, environmental, political, and employment-related—have rolled back that positioning. Marriage has become embedded, particularly for women, as a refuge offering long-term stability and security. That embedding has reignited reluctance to pursue divorce.

Same-sex marriage statistics present a different picture. 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. These figures warrant caution: same-sex marriage was only introduced in England and Wales in 2014, so the pool of marriages old enough to have reached divorce remains young. Still, the 6.6-year figure for female couples is the highest recorded since the first same-sex divorces in 2015. Maine suggested that same-sex couples may approach marriage with particular seriousness because marriage equality required decades of campaigning. Divorce in the LGBT community can carry an additional weight—the sense of having failed not just the relationship but the entire community.

Professor Brianna Perelli-Harris of the University of Southampton, director of the UK Generations and Gender Survey, points to a more fundamental shift: the rise of cohabitation. More than 90% of people in Britain now cohabit before marrying. Her research across 10 European countries found that an increasing proportion of first partnerships end before marriage. "Marriage may therefore be becoming a more selective institution," she said. Couples who move in together and discover incompatibility can separate without ever marrying. Those who proceed to marriage are, her research shows, the couples who are happiest. The data suggests that the people now getting divorced are not the ones who rushed into marriage and quickly regretted it. They are the ones who stayed, who waited, who tried—and who, when they finally decided to leave, had to calculate whether they could afford to.