“Same-sex couples have been able to marry in England and Wales from March 2014. In 2019, the average (median) duration of marriage at the time of divorce was 12.3 years for opposite-sex couples, a small decrease from 12.5 years in the previous year. Unreasonable behaviour was the most common reason for opposite-sex couples divorcing in 2019 with 49% of wives and 35% of husbands petitioning on these grounds it was also the most common reason for same-sex couples divorcing, accounting for 63% of divorces among women and 70% among men.
There were 822 divorces among same-sex couples in 2019, nearly twice the number in 2018 (428 divorces) of these, nearly three-quarters (72%) were between female couples. The divorce rate among opposite-sex couples in 2019 increased to 8.9 divorces per 1,000 married men and women aged 16 years and over from 7.5 in 2018 this increase will have been impacted by the additional processing of casework in 2018.
There were 107,599 divorces of opposite-sex couples in 2019, increasing by 18.4% from 90,871 in 2018 the scale of this increase partly reflects divorce centres processing a backlog of casework in 2018, which is likely to have translated into a higher number of completed divorces in 2019.
