THE first working Monday in January is often referred to as ‘Divorce Day’. It is a date when solicitors are said to see an increase in inquiries from people considering separation, divorce, or ending a civil partnership. It is also when headlines insist that half of marriages end in divorce.
But that line is not a statistic. It is a mood. It is a figure that is in serious need of retiring.
Even within the family law world, they are getting fed up with the ‘Divorce Day’ hype. A recent UK legal publication called it ‘a myth’ and a story that persists more through media repetition than from hard proof.
One major UK law firm has published a piece explicitly aimed at dispelling the claim.
Here is what the Office for National Statistics says, using England and Wales data: ‘Around one in six (16.8 per cent) of marriages formed in 2013 had ended in divorce by their tenth anniversary.’
Knowingly or unknowingly, this is a drag-anchor on the public imagination. Put it another way and the figures show that the vast majority – 83 per cent – of these marriages do not end in divorce within ten years. That is not a society giving up on marriage.
‘Half of marriages end in divorce’ sounds like realism. In practice, the phrase functions as propaganda against commitment.
There is another problem with the standard divorce chatter. It quietly mixes apples and oranges.
Annual divorce totals include divorces from first, second and later marriages, and some people appear more than once across a lifetime because they remarry and divorce again. Even if it were accurate that ‘half of marriages fail’ it does not mean that ‘half of first marriages are doomed’. That simply does not follow and is not true.
So the cultural script is dishonest. A slogan that encourages young couples to treat marriage as a coin toss is not neutral information. It is a self-fulfilling invitation to keep one foot out of the door.
It is true that 102,678 divorces were granted in 2023. That is a large amount of break-up. Any serious discussion has to admit that, and the pain behind it. However it is wrong to use that number as a cultural weapon to tell every couple that their future is doomed. Divorce stats tell you how many divorces were granted that year. They do not tell you that marriage is collapsing, still less that marriage is doomed to fail.
The more interesting and precise fact about marriage in modern Britain is not that some people divorce. It is that marriage keeps refusing to die. Married couples made up 65.1 per cent of families in 2024, hardly suggesting a fringe institution, but rather the continuing backbone of family life.
ONS provisional data reports 216,901 opposite-sex marriages in England and Wales in 2023, equating to 93.5 per cent of legal partnership formations. It shows that traditional marriage is still sought in large numbers, year after year, despite relentless cultural pessimism.
There is another reason we should care about precision. Marriage matters to children. The modern habit is to blur categories and equate all ‘family formations’. They are not.
By the time they turn five, 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents will have experienced their parents’ break-up compared with just 15 per cent of five-year-olds with married parents.
That married parents tend to be older and more financially secure does not erase the point. A culture that treats marriage and cohabitation as interchangeable is a culture that fails to care for children.
Over the past year, I have worked with hundreds of couples in churches and community settings across the UK and beyond. The striking lesson is not that marriage is easy. It is that many marriages that feel stuck are not broken. The problem is often not a lack of love, but a lack of skills, a lack of honest conversation, and a lack of time set aside to rebuild habits.
The January narrative, less about truth and more about theatre, is a squandered opportunity. At a time for new resolutions and new goals, why should that energy be funnelled into quitting? Why not invest it in strengthening what is already there?
Marriage matters and can be fixed. That should be January’s message. When people take marriage seriously they often find it is stronger and more joyful than the culture ever implied.
