When someone gets married, they will — whether solicited or not — get a lot of advice on how to make their marriage last. From "keep lines of communication open" to "don't talk about finances," every person in a marriage lasting more than five years will have their secret potion for everlasting marital bliss.
However, according to new research from The Marriage Foundation, all you need is a little patience. That's because the group's study found that the risk of divorce is highest in the first ten years of a marriage. However, once you break the seal on your first decade together, the odds are you'll be married forever increases. By how much? Check out the data below:
• Based on current rates of divorce, 39% of couples marrying today will divorce.
(The recent figure of 42% from Office for National Statistics excludes overseas weddings)
• Almost all variation in divorce rates comes during the first decade of marriage, including the huge increase in divorces post-1969 divorce reform and the recent reduction from the 1993 peak.
• After surviving the first decade, couples face near-enough identical risk of divorce, regardless of whether they married in the 1960s, 70, 80s or 90s.
• Divorce is concentrated in the early years, peaking between years three and six. There has never been any evidence for a "seven year itch".
• In later years, divorce risk tails off substantially. Only one in five divorces occur after 20 years of marriage and just one in a hundred occurs after 40 years of marriage. The over-hyped rise in over-60s "silver surfer" divorces is due to an increase in the age at which couples marry and not higher divorce rates.
It will be interesting to see the results when the group begins to search the causes of the recent Gray Divorce phenomenon.
For more:
What is the divorce rate? (The Marriage Foundation)
Photo by @4eyesLouer/Flickr