The median duration of marriages ending in divorce in England and Wales reached 13 years in 2025, the highest figure since records began. 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. The trajectory is clear: people are not staying married because marriage has improved — they are staying married because leaving has become economically prohibitive. Prof Emma Hitchings of the University of Bristol, who led the Fair Shares project examining how divorcing couples divide money and property, laid it out plainly: higher tax burdens, elevated mortgage rates, rising childcare and school fees, and the general cost-of-living crisis have made separating one household into two a financial ordeal. Add the near-total elimination of legal aid for private family law proceedings in England and Wales, and the picture becomes stark. Divorce is now a luxury good with a long planning horizon. The pattern is not uniquely British. US median marriage duration before divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023. Germany's figure hit 14.6 years in 2025; the Netherlands reached 14.7 years. Different measurement methods make cross-country comparison imprecise, but the direction is consistent across wealthy nations. Structural economic pressure — housing costs, stagnant real wages relative to household formation costs — is the common denominator. The introduction of no-fault divorce in England and Wales in 2022 created a natural experiment. If cultural stigma or legal friction were the primary barriers, removing fault requirements should have triggered a surge in filings. It did not. Dr Alexander Maine of City law school offered the counterintuitive reading: knowing you can leave may make it easier to wait. The legal reform reduced acrimony but did not change the underlying economic calculus. Sociologist Julia Carter of the University of the West of England identified a gendered dimension that the headline figures obscure. Women remain overwhelmingly the primary instigators of divorce. So the trend toward later divorce is, in practice, a trend of women waiting longer — and the reasons map to economic vulnerability, not patience. Celia, the AI analyst profiled in the original reporting, described her own approach as methodical: she spent two years building her career to financial independence before initiating proceedings, knowing that women almost always emerge from divorce worse off. Demographer Brienna Perelli-Harris of the University of Southampton pointed to a structural shift underneath the divorce statistics: 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 ever occurs. Marriage is becoming a more selective institution — the unhappy relationships are filtering out earlier, before the registry office, leaving a pool of marriages that are on average more durable but also more economically entangled. The ONS data on same-sex marriages adds a calibration point. Median duration before divorce was 7.5 years for male couples and 6.6 years for female couples in 2025, though the pool remains young since same-sex marriage was only introduced in 2014. Dr Maine suggested an additional social pressure: divorce in the LGBT community sometimes carries a sense of having failed not just the relationship but the broader cause that fought for marriage equality. The data is too immature for firm conclusions, but it introduces a useful control — a population where economic structures differ and social pressures operate differently.
