Married poor more stable than unmarried rich

May 1, 2022 by

from The Marriage Foundation:

Poor married couples with children are more stable and likely to stick together than rich unmarried couples with children, according to a major new study from the Marriage Foundation.

The study, Married Poor More Stable that Unmarried Rich – Why marriage is still the best way to find reliable love analyses data from the UK Longitudinal Household Survey, (Understanding Society), grouping parents into the five socio-economic groups and comparing the relative stability between married and unmarried couples in each category over five alternate one year periods, from 2009 to 2010, from 2011 to 2012, from 2013 to 2014, from 2015 to 2016, and from 2017 to 2018. It found that cohabiting parents were 3.4 times more likely to split up compared to married parents (6.5 per cent versus 1.9 per cent) and that this “gap in stability runs across all five income quintiles”.

“The evidence is that this stability gap has remained pretty constant throughout the ten year period of this study. Even after taking into account mothers age, education, ethnicity, household income and relationship happiness, the odds of cohabiting parents splitting up are consistently twice as high as those of married parents” it says.

“The consequence of high levels of breakup among cohabiting parents is that few parents remain as unmarried cohabiting couples as their children grow older. Most split up or marry. Our analysis shows that 86 per cent of all intact couples with 13-15 year old children are married.”

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