“We don’t know anyone whose marriage hit the skids after just a few years,” Celia said, reflecting on her divorce.
asserted
Celia → know → divorce
“Everyone seemed to cling on to their relationships for as long as they possibly could.”
uncertain
they → seem → relationships
It took Celia two years to initiate divorce after realising her 12-year marriage wasn’t going anywhere – and the latest figures show this experience is increasingly common, with marriages that end in divorce now lasting longer than at any point since records began.
asserted
records → take → point
“I approached it very methodically,” the AI analyst said.
asserted
analyst → approach → it
“I knew that women almost always end up financially worse off after divorce, especially where there are children concerned, so I took the time I needed to turbocharge my career before pressing ‘eject’.”
asserted
I → know → eject
It helped, Celia said, that she and Martyn, her former husband, had been in their 40s when they got married.
asserted
they → help → 40s
“Because we were older and wiser, we took the time to try to mend our relationship instead of rushing off to start a new life,” she said.
asserted
she → take → life
“When that didn’t work, Martyn was mature enough to know it was best for the children, me and us that he subtly left me alone to get to where I needed to be before we formally called time on the relationship.”
asserted
we → work → relationship
According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released this week, the median length of a marriage before it ends in divorce reached 13 years in England and Wales in 2025.
uncertain
it → accord → 2025
The figure for opposite-sex marriages has risen from 12.7 years in 2023 and a low of 8.9 years in 1985.
asserted
figure → rise → 1985
At the same time, the proportion of couples divorcing during their first decade of marriage has fallen sharply.
asserted
proportion → divorce → marriage
Among couples who married in 2015, an estimated 16.3% had divorced by their 10th anniversary, compared with 24.7% of those who married in 1995.
asserted
who → marry → 1995
The ONS research does not give any answers as to why marriages are ending later.
asserted
marriages → give → answers
But it does suggest several hypotheses, including that couples may delay the legal end of their relationships until they can afford what comes next.
uncertain
what → suggest → relationships
Prof Emma Hitchings, the deputy head of the University of Bristol law school, who led the Fair Shares project, a nationally representative study in England and Wales examining how divorcing couples divide their money and property, said: “Divorce may have become legally easier, with the advent of no-fault divorces, but separating one household into two has not.
uncertain
separating → lead → two
She said that the longer a couple stayed together, the more tightly entwined – and harder to untangle – their finances became.
asserted
finances → say → ?
“Every financial aspect of divorce is harder,” she said.
asserted
she → say → divorce
Then throw in the cuts to legal aid for almost all private family law proceedings in England and Wales, and you can see why couples need to spend more time trying to calculate how they can feasibly afford to separate – which may well account for why marriages are lasting longer before divorce.”
uncertain
marriages → throw → divorce
Celia said she and Martyn had a number of friends who also broke up after marriages of similar lengths.
asserted
who → say → lengths
But we have three groups of friends, across Europe and in the US, who went through divorces after marriages of a decade or more.”
asserted
who → have → decade
The research bears out Celia’s experience.
asserted
research → bear → experience
In the US, the Pew Research Center found that the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023.
asserted
length → find → 2023
Germany’s federal statistics office put the average length of marriages ending in divorce at 14.6 years in 2025.
asserted
office → put → 2025
Belgium’s statistics office recorded a median of 12.03 years in 2024.
asserted
office → record → 2024
The figures are not directly comparable as countries collect and present divorce statistics differently.
asserted
countries → collect → statistics
But the broad pattern of marriages lasting longer before divorce is not solely a British phenomenon.
asserted
marriages → last → divorce
Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law and policy at the University of Exeter, said there was a curious feature of the British figures.
asserted
Barlow → say → figures
“No-fault divorce, introduced in 2022, made the legal route out of marriage more straightforward – but there has been no corresponding rush into divorce,” she said.
asserted
she → introduce → divorce
One possibility was that knowing you could leave made it easier to wait, said Dr Alexander Maine, a senior lecturer at the City law school who leads a research project called: “Queer families and the law after ‘I do’.”
uncertain
I → know → project
“Another is that no-fault divorce could allow couples to work through a separation without the acrimony that previously accompanied assigning blame,” he said.
uncertain
he → allow → blame
Greg Ceely, the ONS’s head of population life events, emphasised that until more research was done, these all remained hypotheses.
asserted
these → emphasise → events
“The change can’t definitively be attributed to any one thing – or any number of things – because there are so many social and economic factors that could also affect the trend,” he said.
uncertain
he → attribute → trend
Certainly, experts find no problem in pointing to other possible reasons for marriages lasting longer before divorce, from disruption to the family courts affecting the timing of divorces in the years around Covid, as well as influencing the duration figures, to the 2022 changes introducing a minimum 20-week period between the start of proceedings and application for a final order.
asserted
marriages → find → order
Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, who is researching couples living together after divorce or separation, said wider global and environmental uncertainty was also having an impact.
asserted
uncertainty → research → impact
“I hear people saying that even if their marriage isn’t great, they don’t want to introduce uncertainty into their homes as well, especially if there are children in the relationship who are having to negotiate this unstable world outside their family homes,” she said.
asserted
she → hear → homes
Carter pointed to the fact that women remain overwhelmingly the main instigators of divorce.
asserted
women → point → divorce
“So if we’re saying that people are waiting later to get divorce, we’re actually saying that women are waiting longer in order to get divorced.
asserted
women → say → divorce
So you’ve got to look at what’s changed for women,” she said.
asserted
she → get → women
In the 1990s and 2000s, she said, “society was all about female empowerment, girl power, Sex and the City, and ‘let’s go out and grab our opportunities’.
asserted
’s → say → opportunities
“I think we can see the impact of that in intimate family lives where there’s an embedding of marriage as a kind of refuge, a place of long-term stability and security for couples – and especially for women,” she said.
asserted
she → think → women
…and 13 more, not listed.
The Aporia
