What is the most common reasons couples give for cohabitation in recent years?
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This post explores the long and short term trends in marriage, divorce and cohabitation in the United Kingdom. Show
It has been written as an introduction to the ‘marriage and divorce’ topic which is usually taught as the second topic within the AQA’s families and households A-level sociology specification. Marriage and Divorce Trends: An OverviewThere was a long term decrease in the number of marriages per year since the late 1960s when there were just over 400 000 marriages every year, until around 2008, when the number hit around 230 000. There has been a slight increase since then and there are now around 240 000 marriages every year in the UK, and this number has been relatively stable since 2008. The number of Divorces per year increased rapidly following the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, and then increased steadily until the early 1980s. In the late 1950s, there were only around 20 000 Divorces per year, by the early 1980s this figure had risen to 160 000 per year (quite an increase!) It then stabilised for about 10 years and then started to decline in 2003, the number of divorces per year is still decline. There are currently just under 90 000 divorces per year in England and Wales. Marriage StatisticsThere has been a long term decline in the number of marriages in England and Wales. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were over 400 00 marriages a year, by 2017 there were just under 250 000 marriages a year. Although the decline seems to have slowed recently, since 2008. Marriage RatesThe marriage rates (unsurprisingly) mirror the above – but you see a more obvious slowing down of the decline since the 2000s here. What is the average age of Marriage?The average age of marriage has increased from 25 for women in the 1960s to 36 for women in 2017, the average age for men is slightly higher. The 36 average figure might be a bit misleading, the median age is slightly younger as shown by the chart below – late 20s and early 30s are when most women get married! The Decline of Church WeddingsThe above chart shows the drastic decrease in religious marriages, down to only 22% of all marriage ceremonies by 2017. 90% of couples cohabited before marrying in 2017, up from 70% in the late 1990s. Divorce StatisticsThe Divorce Rate was extremely low in the late 1950s, at only 2.5 per 100 000 married couples. The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 led to this increasing rapidly to 10 per thousand in just a few years, by the early 1970s. The Divorce Rate continued to increase until the early 1990s, when it hit almost 15 per thousand married couples. Since then it has been falling and currently stands at 7.5 NB – The Divorce Rate shows a slightly different trend to the ‘number of divorces’ – this is relative to the number of married couples! What percent of marriages end in divorce?It depends on the year of marriage! If we look at the ‘peak year’, 43.9% of people who got married in 1987 were divorced by 2017, the latest figures available. NB this rate might well be going down, as marriage has been declining since 1987. How long does the average marriage last?The length of marriage is increasing. For marriages which end in divorce, the median length of a marriage stands at around 12.5 years. Main sources used to write this postOffice for National Statistics: Divorces in England and Wales 2018 ONS: Marriages in England and Wales 2017 ONS: Marriage and Divorce on the Rise, Over 65 and Over. Share this:
Like this:Like Loading... There are four main factors which can explain for the long term increase in divorce:
This post examines these factors and others.
Social Policy ChangesSocial Policy changes are the first factor that explains rapidly increasing divorce in the early 1970s – the 1969 the Divorce Act extended the grounds of divorce to ‘irretrievable breakdown’, making divorce possible even if only one partner wanted a divorce. However, this cannot explain all of the increase, since the divorce rate was rising before the act, and continued to rise for many years afterwards. Economic FactorsWe also need to look at economic factors – Increasing inequality in the UK has meant that the lower social classes now get paid less compared to rising living costs (mortgages/ bills). This means that both partners in a marriage now need to do paid work to get by, which puts a strain on the marriage which leads to higher numbers getting divorced. A positive evaluation of this is that divorce rates are higher amongst poorer families. FunctionalismThere are a number of reasons linked to the Functional Fit Theory which could explain the increase in divorce: • Functionalists such as Goode (1971) believe that conflict has increased because the family has become more isolated from other kin, placing an increased burden on husbands and wives who have little support from other relatives. • Dennis (1975) believes that because the family performs fewer functions the bonds between husband and wife are weaker. • Allan and Crowe (2001) point out that because the family is no longer an economic unit, this makes it easier for families to break up. The New RightWould claim that increasingly generous welfare benefits for single mothers is a crucial factor which allows women to divorce if they deem it necessary – because if divorce occurs within a family, in 9/10 cases, the child will go with the mother – making it difficult to find full time work – and hence benefits may be a necessary link in the chain of explaining the increase in divorce. The New Right would also see the increasing divorce rate as a sign of wider moral decline, a point of view which is not shared by the next three perspectives. Feminism/ changing gender rolesThe changing position of women in society. Is crucial to understanding the increase in divorce rates. Women today are much more likely to be in employment today and this means they are less financially dependent on their husbands and thus freer to end an unsatisfactory marriage. The proportion of women in some kind of paid work is now 70%, whereas in the 1950s it was less than 50% Giddens himself argues that two trends are the most important – the impact of the Feminist movement, which arguably lies behind all of the above changes, and also the advances in contraception – which allows women to avoid unwanted pregnancies – and women in marriages without children will be freer to leave those marriages. Feminists however, point out that the advances of women can be exaggerated – women still earn less than men, and traditional gender norms remain in many families. PostmodernismBoth religion and traditional values have declined in Britain. As a result there is no longer a set of social values which force people into staying married, there is less social stigma attached to getting a divorce and so people are freer to choose to get divorced. This change reflects the declining importance of social structure and the rise of consumer culture – the idea that individuals can choose their own lifestyles. Giddens (1992) believes that the nature of marriage has changed because the nature of intimate relationships more generally have changed: • In the early period of modernity in the late 18th century, marriage became more than an economic arrangement as the idea of romantic love developed. The marriage partner was idealised as someone who would perfect a person’s life. Women kept their virginity waiting for the perfect partner. • In the era of what Gidden’s calls ‘late modernity’, plastic sexuality has developed. This means that sex can be for pleasure rather than conceiving children with your perfect marriage partner. Relationships and marriages are no longer seen as necessarily being permanent. • Marriage is now based on confluent love – Love that is dependent upon partners benefitting from the relationship. If they are not fulfilled in their relationship, couples no longer stay together out of a sense of duty, so divorce and relationship breakdown become more common. Ulrich Beck points out that divorce has increased because individualisation. This involves:
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Like this:Like Loading... Emma Watson recently coined the term ‘self-partnering’ to demonstrate her happiness with being single, which is in an increasing trend in the UK There are 16.7 million people in the UK who are single and never married, and the number is increasing, with almost 370 000 more single people in the UK in 2018 compared to 2017, according to the Office for National Statistics. Unsurprisingly, you’re more likely to be single and never married when you’re younger compared to when you’re older, but at Emma Watson’s age almost half of people are single. However this has declined to only 25% of the population for people in their mid 40s. NB – being single and not married doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lonely or celibate: many of these people will be dating, maybe in the early stages of a relationship, maybe in a more serious relationship and just not living together, so this just their formal status, rather than their actual relationship situation. It would be interesting to get some stats on how many of these people are actually ‘single’ in the sense of not being in any kind of romantic relationship! Relevance of this to A-level sociologyThis is just a quick update to highlight the continued trend away from marriage and towards singledom. This is relevant to the ‘marriage and divorce’ topics and the ‘decline in the family’ debate within families and households. If you’re interested in understanding why there are more single people, this post is a good starting point, on the increase in single person households, a closely related topic! You can also use the ‘definition’ of single by the ONS to illustrate some of the limitations of official statistics – in that it isn’t the same as how most of us would use the word ‘single’ when we talk about relationships. Share this:
Like this:Like Loading... Summary revision notes (in diagram form) on sociological perspectives applied to the decline of marriage in society, written to help students revise for the families and households section of the AQA’s A-level sociology paper 2: topics in sociology. You will probably need to click to enlarge/ save the picture below! Other sources you might find useful:
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Like this:Like Loading... According to the Office for National Statistics, for the population in England Wales aged 16 and over, as of 2015
The problem with these statistics is that they do not actually tell us how many ‘single’ people there are in England and Wales (let alone the United Kingdom) – at least not if we take the commonly accepted definition of a single person as ‘someone who is unmarried or not involved in a stable sexual relationship’. Below I explore why I think there are way less single people in the country than these official statistics suggest… Single people never cohabited or marriedThere are 16 million people who are ‘single and never cohabited or married’, equivalent to 34.5% of the population aged over 16 in England and Wales, at least according to Office for National Statistics, 2015 data. However, while it is interesting to know how many people are ‘single, and have never married or cohabited’, this isn’t the same as the number of people who are actually single, for the following reasons:
NB – the above data came from the Labour Force Survey, which gleans its information about relationship status from a series of interview questions – questions which will in no way tell us how many actual single people there are in the U.K. – this particular question is only really only useful for telling us the number of married people or in a formal civil partnership and cannot tell us very much about the relationship status of the non-married/ civil partnership people. In fairness to LFS, it does go on to ask whether people are ‘cohabiting’, the results for which are shown below… People ‘not living as a couple’A second possible way of measuring the number of single people in the country, again taken from ONS Labour Force Survey data, is to look at ‘living arrangements’ – and here we find that approximately 39% of the population are not living as a couple, while 61% are living as a couple. I’d say this is a more valid way of measuring the number of single people in the country because it includes a clear indication that 61% of the population are either married or cohabiting, rather than just the number of people who are ‘married’ like in the first data set. However, it still does not tell us how many single people there are in the country, because some proportion of people not living as a couple will still be in committed relationships, but the data does not tell us this! We are thus forced to look elsewhere to find out how many actual single people there are in the country…. Other sources of data about ‘single people’I guess I’ve got to at least mention Facebook….. According to ‘statistics brain‘, 37% of people report their relationship status as single on Facebook. However, this data has validity problems because:
This 2017 Statista survey reports that around 27% of the UK population aged 40 to 70 reported that they were single, not currently in a relationship. While I’m inclined to intuit that this is a valid figure, unfortunately I’m not in a position to objectively validate the findings because I ain’t prepared to pay the subscription fee to gain the access required to get the information on sampling techniques (if they even exist in any meaningful sense because this was an online survey!) Having said that, the above data is broadly backed up by this 2014 YouGov Poll which reports that 30% of the UK population are single (although the analysis doesn’t go into any detail about this aspect of the poll, limiting itself to how people who are in relationships feel about each other). Personally I think this 30% figure sounds about right, given that the numbers of single people in their 20s and 30s will probably be higher than those in the their 40s-70s, you’d expect the later percentage to be slightly higher than the Statista results, so it triangulates nicely. So…. how many people are single in the UK? About 30%. Signposting and Related PostsThis topic is usually taught as part of the families and households module in the first year of A-level Sociology, and is part of the ‘family-diversity’ subtopic. It may seem odd studying single people in a module on the family, but the simply fact is that declining marriage and increasing divorce mean that more people stay single for more of their lives than ever before! Further Reading…..This Enduring Love Study might be of interest. Postscript – Fantasy reporting on the geographic distribution of single people Heads up on click-bait lists like this from The Independent which show you the ‘cities with the most single people in’ – here are the results: The percentages above are for people who are ‘single and never married’, the problem is that most of these are university towns…. where lots of young people live, most of whom will move on to another city once they’ve graduated, and to my mind to get a realistic picture of how ‘committed to single life’ a city’s population is, you’d need to control for age, and how long they intend to stay in that city. It’s sort or ironic, somehow, that geographical instability (most students only intend to reside in their university town temporarily) skews the figures on how many people are not in a stable relationship (i.e. single). Then of course, as I mentioned above, many of these people will actually be in committed relationships. Share this:
Like this:Like Loading... English Conversation About A wedding Please enable JavaScript English Conversation About A weddingThis post summaries some of the changing trends (and continuities) in family and household structure in the UK, using data from the Office for National Statistics which collects a range of data annually on families and households in the UK The Office for National Statistics Families and Households Hub Page is an obviou starting point for exploring this issue . Some of the headline stats include the following:
Changes to families and households 2005 – 2015
There has been a significant increase in the number of cohabiting couples, both with and without children, and a slight increase in lone parent households. The number of married couple households both with and without children has remained stable, which means that the overall picture is one of a slight trend towards increasing family diversity and away from marriage. 2. Marriage and Cohabitation Trends The chart below clearly shows the slight decline in married households compared to cohabiting and single parent households, but there are still almost three times as many married households compared to cohabiting households! 3. Family Size Family size appears to have remained pretty stable over the past 15 years 4. Households Size in the UK We have quite a small average households size in the UK – with two and one person households making up around two thirds of all households. 5.Multi Family Households Given that they’re starting from a small base, there has been a significant ten year increase in multi family households – households with two or more families in, an increase of one third in twenty years.
6. The increase in People Living Alone There has been a slow and steady increase in the overall numbers of people living alone, but this varies a lot by age – generally the number of older people living alone has increased, the number of younger people living alone has decreased. Share this:
Like this:Like Loading... I knocked up this brief ‘infographic’ in Skitch on the iPad – explaining the decline of marriage and the increase in divorce. You might also like the more detailed posts on this topic (which should be linked below) Share this:
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Identify two trends (changes) in the pattern of marriage despite the fact that the overall number of marriages have declined (4)
Suggest three social changes which explain why there has been a decline in the marriage rate (6)
Suggest three reasons for the overall rise in the divorce rate since 1969 (6)
Suggest two reasons for the recent decrease in divorce rates (4)
Suggest two alternatives to Divorce (4)
Identify two consequences of an increasing divorce rate (4)
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Like this:Like Loading... This is one way of teaching/ revising this sub-topic within the marriage and divorce topic of the Families and Households Module. You might need to click on it to enlarge it! Share this:
Like this:Like Loading... Sociological explanations for the long term decline in marriage include changing gender roles, the impact of feminism and female empowerment, economic factors such as the increasing cost of living and the individualisation associated with postmodernism. This post has been written for the families and household topic within A-level sociology. . Overview of the trends in marriage in the UKOffice for National Statistics: Divorces in England and Wales 2018 There has been a long term decline in the number of marriages in England and Wales. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were over 400 00 marriages a year, by 2017 there were just under 250 000 marriages a year. Although the decline seems to have slowed recently, ad even increased since 2008. The above graph only shows the long term overall decline in marriage. Other trends include:
Evaluation Point – Even though it’s declining, marriage is still an important institution because….
Explaining the long term decrease in marriageYou may need to click on the image below to see it properly Economic Factors – The increasing cost of living and the increasing cost of weddings.Increasing property prices in recent years may be one of the factors why couples choose to get married later in life. The average deposit on a first time home is now over £30 000, with the average cost of a wedding being around £18 000. So for most couples it is literally a choice between getting married in their 20s and then renting/ living with parents, or buying a house first and then getting married in their 30s. The second option is obviously the more financially rational. Changing gender rolesLiberal Feminists point to changing gender roles as one of the main reasons why couples get married later. More than half of the workforce is now female which means that most women do not have to get married in order to be financially secure. In fact, according to the theory of the genderquake, the opposite is happening – now that most jobs are in the service sector, economic power is shifting to women meaning that marriage seems like a poor option for women in a female economy. The New RightBlame the decline of marriage on moral decline – part of the broader breakdown of social institutions and due to too much acceptance of diversity. This results in the inability of people to commit to each other, and they see this as bad for society and the socialisation of the next generation. PostmodernisationPostmodernists explain the decline in marriage as a result of the move to postmodern consumer society characterised by greater individual choice and freedom. We are used to being consumers and picking and choosing, and so marriage is now a matter of individual choice. Another process associated with Postmodernisation is the decline of tradition and religion (secularisation) – as a result there is less social stigma attached to cohabiting or remarrying after a divorce. Late ModernismAssociated with the ideas of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck – argues that the decline in marriage is not as simple as people simply having more freedom – People are less likely to get married because of structural changes making life more uncertain. People may want to get married, but living in a late-modern world means marriage doesn’t seem like a sensible option. Ulrich Beck argues that fewer people getting married is because of an increase in ‘risk consciousness’ – people see that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce and so they are less willing to take the risk and get married. Beck also talks about indivdualisation – a new social norm is that our individual desires are more important than social commitments, and this makes marriage less likely. Giddens builds on this and says that the typical relationship today is the Pure Relationship – one which lasts only as long as both partners are happy with it, not because of tradition or a sense of commitment. This makes cohabitation and serial monogamy rather than the long term commitment of a marriage more likely. Evaluation Points
Signposting and Related PostsThis topic is part of the families and households module and related posts include: Trends in marriage, divorce and cohabitation UK For a more ‘human explanation’ check out this video – sociological perspectives on the decline in marriage What are some reasons why couples might choose to cohabitate?The second panel of Table 2 reports results for currently married couples who cohabited before marrying. The three most common reasons – not ready to commit, share living expenses, and make sure compatible – were the same for premarital cohabitors and current cohabitors.
What are the reasons for the increase in cohabitation?The seemingly stable idea of marriage now began to contract for many people. If their partner was not suitable, divorce was now available, which is another factor for the rise in cohabitation and the decrease in marriage. Cohabitation is now seen as an option instead of marriage supporting more freedom and flexibility.
Where is cohabitation most common?Cohabitation followed by marriage is most common (describing more than 30 percent of first unions) in Austria, Germany, and Norway. Notes: Table shows only EU member-states plus Russia and the U.S., and only countries with valid information on religious affiliation.
Who is most likely to be cohabiting?Young adults – those ages 18 to 29 – are almost twice as likely to have cohabited as they are to have married (44% vs.
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