Subtopic: Divorces

This bulletin analyses divorce statistics by sex, age and marital status before marriage, duration of marriage, age at divorce, the number and age of children involved, and the grounds for divorce.

This article on ‘Households and families’ is the third in a series which aims to explore in more detail the different domains that have been considered as important for the measurement of National Well-being. It firstly focuses on family and household formation and then on individual aspects of these such as marriage and divorce.

This bulletin analyses divorce statistics by sex, age and marital status before marriage, duration of marriage, age at divorce, the number and age of children involved, and the grounds for divorce.

The Civil Partnership Act 2004, which came into force in December 2005 allowing same-sex couples in the UK to register their relationship for the first time, celebrated its fifth anniversary in December 2010. This article examines civil partnership in England and Wales, five years on from its introduction. The characteristics of those forming civil partnerships between 2005 and 2010 including age, sex and previous marital/civil partnership status are examined. These are then compared with the characteristics of those marrying over the same period. Further comparisons are also made between civil partnership dissolutions and divorce. The article presents estimates of the number of people currently in civil partnerships and children of civil partners. Finally the article examines attitudes towards same-sex and civil partner couples both in the UK and in other countries across Europe.

The article presents an overview of trends in cohabitation and marriage in Britain over several decades, using a consistent set of retrospective histories from the General Household Survey 1979–2007. Time-trends are presented, for men and women, of: the experience of different types of partnership by specified ages, the frequency of premarital cohabitation, the average time spent in different types of partnership, the timing of life course transitions, and the outcome of cohabitation and marriage at the fifth and tenth anniversaries.

2009