Some rare cheer: millennials are divorcing less than their parents. This might be cause for celebration if the long-term prognosis for marriage wasn’t so poor.
Last year, divorces spiked by ten per cent: 113,505 couples broke up in 2021, compared to 103,592 divorces in 2020, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Divorce laws allowing couples to avoid pinning the blame on each other and backlogs caused by the pandemic are likely to be to blame for the rise in breakups.
Tucked away inside these numbers, however, is a graph that contains a glimmer of good news: millennials are divorcing a lot less after ten years of marriage than their parents and their grandparents.
Generation Xers – the parents of today’s millennials (born 1981 to 1996) – were the most likely to divorce after a decade of wedded bliss, with 23 per cent tapping out in a decade.
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