Marriage longevity in Britain is nearly back to 1970s levels

By THE DATA TEAM

ON NOVEMBER 20th Queen Elizabeth II, the British monarch, celebrates her 70th wedding anniversary to Prince Philip. The queen is no stranger to milestones of longevity. In 2015 she became the longest-serving English monarch, surpassing Queen Victoria; the following year, with the death of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, she took over the crown as the world’s longest-living ruler. When she celebrated her 90th birthday in 2016, just a fifth of the women born in Britain in the same year as her were alive to witness the festivities.

Yet whereas Elizabeth’s long run of good health is reflective of the overall trend during her reign of increasing life expectancy, the durability of her marriage makes her an outlier. Like most people of her generation, she and Prince Philip have stuck by each other: among Britons married in 1963, the earliest year for which comparable figures are available, only a quarter had ended in divorce by 2015. In contrast, 40% of couples who headed down the aisle in the early 1980s have parted ways. By the mid-1990s over a tenth of marriages failed within just five years.

Marriages have become slightly less likely to end in divorce since then: the five-year rate has fallen back to around 7%. However, that decline may in part be a function of fewer people entering ill-advised marriages to begin with. Since the 1970s, the number of weddings in Britain each year has fallen by roughly a third. As a result, even though a bigger share of already-married couples are now sticking it out, the last year that the married population outnumbered singletons was in 2002. Today, the latter exceeds the former by 13%.

Just as the queen reflects the marital patterns of her generation, her children are representative of their cohort. Three of them have been divorced, following very public marriages in the 1970s and 1980s. Her only child who is still married to a first spouse, Edward, rarely attracts attention from the media. Perhaps one cause of the success of Elizabeth’s marriage is her reserved nature and caution with the press.

Read more in our special report on marriage