by Tony Rucinski, Coalition for Marriage
Fewer than half of all adults in England and Wales are in a man-woman marriage. However, the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which published the data last Friday, did not point that out. Instead, their headline says 51.1 per cent of adults are married or in a civil partnership. But their figure includes civil partnerships at 0.9 per cent and same-sex marriages at 0.4. Take those out and marriage as every generation before ours knew it – the lifelong union of one man and one woman – stands at 49.8 per cent – under half. And as far as I can find, nobody else has noticed.
The decline has been slow, but it is real. Ten years ago the ONS reported the married or civil partnered share was at 52.3 per cent. It is 51.1 today. The never-marrieds have grown from 32.6 to 34.9 per cent of adults, and just over one in ten of us now lives with a partner we have never married – up from 9.8 to 10.8 per cent. The ONS confirms its ten-year comparisons are statistically significant. And the share has fallen even though more people are married, not fewer – over 800,000 more in a man-woman marriage than ten years ago, right there in the ONS’s own spreadsheet. The adult population simply grew faster than that. Marriage isn’t being abandoned. It is going unchosen.
The never-married share has risen fastest in two age groups at once – the 25 to 34s, and people aged 45 to 69 – up between 4 and 7 percentage points in a decade. For a thirty-year-old, maybe we can say they not have married yet. But for a sixty-year-old, marriage hasn’t been postponed, it has been skipped.
And the Government’s answer?