Marriages can come under pressure during the holiday season but the divorce rate has fallen (Image: iStockPhoto/RichVintage)
Tomorrow is the fabled “divorce day” when feuding couples are expected to rush to lawyers to untie the matrimonial knot.
But a new study found “no evidence” to support the “myth” that the first Monday in January is the busiest day for family lawyers.
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In fact, the Marriage Foundation is heartened by a sharp decline in divorces in England and Wales.
Research director Harry Benson said: “At the beginning of each year one family law firm or another always advances the claim that the first Monday of January is so-called divorce day, the day when they see a massive spike in enquiries, but this seems based on nothing more than anecdotal evidence.
"There is no official national data that backs this up and even analysing Ministry of Justice statistics produces an unclear picture.”
Official figures show there were 80,057 divorces granted in England and Wales in 2022 – a 29.5% decrease on the previous year and the lowest number of divorces since 1971.
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The median average duration of marriages that ended in divorce was 12.9 years for opposite-sex couples and 7.5 and 6.3 years for male and female same-sex couples, respectively.
Mr Benson said the research had found nothing more than a “tiny increase in the average number of divorce starts” in the first quarter of a year. The foundation describes any claim that divorce day exists in reality as “far from convincing”.
He said that while “any uptick” in enquiries to lawyers might be the result of “pent-up demand from the two-week holiday break”, he could “say with absolute certainty that divorce rate in the UK has been steadily declining”.
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A separate study by the foundation last year found the lifetime risk of divorce has dropped to 35% – down from 44% in 1986.
The number of wife-granted divorces fell from 109,883 in 1986 to 70,607 in 2021. During this time the number of husband-granted divorces dropped from 43,439 to 41,327.
Mr Benson said the decline in the divorce rate was “good news for marriage, good news for couples looking to tie the knot and good news for society” .