Sorted Magazine

Tag: Marriage Foundation

  • Marriage research: Rock ‘n rollers have the highest celeb divorce rates

    Throughout Marriage Week 7th-14th February 2023, Harry Benson, Sorted Columnist and Research Director at the Marriage Foundation shares a series of daily articles about the latest academic research.

    Harry writes: Rock’n rollers have the highest celebrity divorce rates, finds our latest analysis. Our new report, covered in the Sunday Express and Mail on Sunday, shows who has bucked the trend.

    Rock stars face the highest risk to their marriages, perhaps due to adrenaline-fuelled nightly performances on tour in front of huge crowds followed by after parties, alcohol and opportunity! Despite their wealth, money doesn’t seem to protect the marriages of celebrities.

    The problem is fame. In my analysis, I’ve divided celebrities into categories of music, screen, and sports/other. At 60%, music stars have the highest divorce rate over 18 years, followed by screen stars at 53%. Sports and other stars have the lowest divorce rate at 42%, yet this is still higher than the UK average at 32%.

    While fame itself may not be quite so toxic for sportsmen and women whose daily routines tend to involve tremendous self-discipline and little to no alcohol, ego and opportunity are clearly sufficient to raise divorce risk above average levels.

    For screen stars it is easy to imagine how inappropriate close relationships can become established with other fellow actors because of the intimacy and suspension of normal daily life required to pretend to be somebody else during a film or theatre season.

    But it is rock stars who face the highest risk to their marriages.

    Read our report here.

    Photo: Wikimedia Commons

  • Marriage research: Births outside marriage above 50% for first time

    Throughout Marriage Week 7th-14th February 2023, Harry Benson, Sorted columnist and Research Director at the Marriage Foundation, shares a series of daily articles about the latest academic research.

    Harry writes: Births outside of marriage have been hovering just below 50 per cent for the past decade. A sharp increase above 50 per cent in 2021 is almost certainly a knock-on effect of the ban and restrictions on marriage during lockdown in the previous year.

    New births data for 2021 from the Office for National Statistics have shown a sharp fall in births within marriage to below 50% for the first time. But have a deeper look and you can see that the share of births within marriage has fallen between 5% and 8% across all socio-economic groups. This is a phenomenon that has affected everyone.

    In typical years, as many as one in six marriages take place either just before or just after their baby is born. Many of these couples will have been forced to delay their wedding. Although the overall trend remains down, we should expect to see some sort of rebound in births within marriage in 2022.
    Read my full comment here.

    Photo: Negative Space

  • Marriage research: Divorce cases rose by 9.6% in 2021

    Marriage research: Divorce cases rose by 9.6% in 2021

    Throughout Marriage Week 7th-14th February 2023, Harry Benson, Sorted Columnist and Research Director at the Marriage Foundation shares a series of daily articles about the latest academic research.

    Harry writes: Divorces were up by 9.6% in 2021. According to new figures from the Office for National Statistics there was a big rise in divorce in 2021. Some of this is real. But most is a one-off due to lockdown and court delays.

    We have seen little to no indication of a big rise in 2021 divorces either from lockdown surveys that look at how much people are thinking about divorce or the Ministry of Justice figures that report divorce applications. We wrote a report on this here.

    So does this 9.6% rise suggest a problem with marriages or a problem with the divorce system?

    One way of looking at it, is to recognise that almost all changes in divorce rates over the past 40 years have come from divorces granted to wives rather than husbands. This system changed in April 2022 but it gives us a way of seeing if there’s any real change.

    If the recent rise is all about the system, we should see fluctuations in the husband divorces in the last few years. And we did. Read my full comment here.

    Main photo courtesy of This Morning