My last post looked at marriage trends. So how about divorce?
Are more couples staying hitched? Or are more getting out of unsatisfactory unions?
We’ll start with some context. According to the most recent Australian Census in 2021, just under 8.8 million people aged 15 years and over (or 46.6%) were in a registered marriage and 2.2 million people (or 11.5%) were in a de facto (a.k.a. common law) marriage. The divorce rates we’re discussing here cover only registered marriages as de facto separations aren’t processed and recorded the same way.
Who is getting divorced?
Looking at the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data from 2023, the average age of age of Australians who got divorced in 2023 was 44 years for women and 47 years for men. Their average (median) length of marriage to divorce was 13, following an average time to separation of 9 years. I must say unlucky 13 seems like a much more appropriate number than the old ‘7 year itch’.
Is the happiness curve to blame?
Why am I not surprised at the mid-40s being the most common time for divorce? The so-called ‘happiness curve’ thought to be underlying the midlife crisis. There’s a bunch of research that on average our levels of happiness and satisfaction with life bottom out somewhere around our mid-40s with peaks in early adulthood and later life. Although not all research finds this pattern, there’s definitely something going on around the mid-40s.
Historical divorce rates in Australia
As we saw in the post about marriage rates in Australia, what happens in the wider world including government laws affect people’s decisions to divorce. Have a look at this graph of divorce rates in Australia since 1901. As I’ve explained before these numbers can be translated as the number of divorces for every 1,000 people in Australia. Until the end of World War I divorce was a rarity. The few years post WWI (1919-21) marked the start of an increase in people ending their marriages. Move along to the end of World War II and you’ll see the next big increase. So, there’s something about wars that makes people reevaluate their marriages. The post-WWII divorce bump also came after a huge increase in marriage rates that started after the worst of the Great Depression around 1933 and continued until 1942. It was a strange time in the world and perhaps people coupled up for a sense of security, to ease uncertainty then once the war was over, the reevaluation came.
The introduction of no-fault divorce
Looking at the graph of divorce rates again, after the World Wars you’ll see rates then stayed steady until a huge spike in 1975 when they increased by 250%. This was thanks to the introduction of ‘no-fault divorce’ under Australian law. Prior to this, if one partner wanted to divorce they had to prove one of 14 legally approved grounds (a.k.a. faults) existed. These grounds included adultery, cruelty, addiction, desertion and insanity. No doubt 1975 marked the end of a golden era for Australia’s private investigators.
Divorces are trending down
While marriage rates began declining around 1970, divorces have followed a different trend. After the 1975 ‘divorce rush’, rates rumbled along around 2.9 per 1,000 people from 1982 until 2001 when they began a downward trend. Keeping in mind, these rates are relative to population and the raw (or crude in statistical terms) numbers look different as you can see in this comparison across years.
Did the pandemic increase divorces?
Near the end of the graph, you’ll notice a small uptick in divorces in 2021, the second year of the pandemic. Not surprising, as we know the pandemic lockdowns were tough on relationships. I thought the most locked down Australians in Melbourne, Victoria might be responsible for this pandemic divorce bump. Surprisingly not. In fact, Victoria had the equal lowest rate of divorce in 2021 along with the Northern Territory (1.9 per 1000 people). The Australian Bureau of Statistics says this 2021 uptick may be due to a speeding up of the Court processes for divorces which meant more were finalised in 2021 than in the past.
Divorces in same gender and non-binary Australians
Marriage equality arrived in Australia in 2017 and although those folks who married in that first year are still quite a few years away from the 13-year average length of marriage at divorce, you may be wondering how the marriages of same gender and non-binary gender folks are travelling. I can’t calculate divorce rates per 1,000 people in the same and non-binary gendered populations due to a lack of accurate population data. What the ABS does tell us is that in 2023, there were 696 divorces including partners of the same gender or another gender term. These made up 1.4% of all the divorces in that year. Of those 696 divorces, 57% were female partners, 33% were male partners and 11% included a person identifying by another gender term. We can compare this to the number of marriages partners of the same gender or another gender term in 2023 (4,558) that made up 3.8% of all marriages in that year. While we really need to wait longer to see trends over 13+ years, it looks like, so far, the divorce numbers for these folks seem relatively low.
How many marriages end in divorce?
It’s often said that half of all marriages end in divorce. But is that true in Australia now? I’ve looked high and low for data tracking all marriages over the long term but no luck. I’ve come up with a quick and dirty way to address this question – looking at how many divorces happened in 2023 relative to how many marriages happened 13 years before (being the average length of marriage).
According to my quick and dirty estimate in the image above, 40% of marriages in Australia end in divorce in the average time span for that to happen (13 years). That means, if you’re about to get married then you can realistically expect a 60% chance of your marriage surviving. (*I take no responsibility for the validity of this estimate).
If you’d like to increase the probability of your marriage going the distance then talk to me about commitment coaching.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Marriages and Divorces (1995 & 2023)
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Social Marital Status, 2021 Census of Population and Housing.