According to figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released this week, the median length of a marriage before it ends in divorce reached 13 years in England and Wales in 2025. This is up from 12.7 years in 2023 and a low of 8.9 years in 1985. At the same time, the proportion of couples divorcing during their first decade of marriage has fallen sharply. Among couples who married in 2015, an estimated 16.3% had divorced by their 10th anniversary, compared with 24.7% of those who married in 1995. The ONS research does not give any answers as to why marriages are ending later. However, it suggests several hypotheses, including that couples may delay the legal end of their relationships until they can afford what comes next. Celia, an AI analyst who initiated divorce after her 12-year marriage, said she took time to turbocharge her career before pressing 'eject'. She noted that she and her former husband, Martyn, were in their 40s when they got married and took time to mend their relationship before formally ending it. Celia said she had friends who also broke up after marriages of similar lengths, with groups across Europe and in the US experiencing divorces after marriages of a decade or more. In the US, the Pew Research Center found that the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023. Germany’s federal statistics office put the average length of marriages ending in divorce at 14.6 years in 2025. In the Netherlands, the figure was 14.7 years. Belgium’s statistics office recorded a median of 12.03 years in 2024. The figures are not directly comparable as countries collect and present divorce statistics differently. But the broad pattern of marriages lasting longer before divorce is not solely a British phenomenon. Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law and policy at the University of Exeter, noted that no-fault divorce, introduced in 2022, made the legal route out of marriage more straightforward, but there has been no corresponding rush into divorce. Dr Alexander Maine, a senior lecturer at the City law school, suggested that knowing one could leave made it easier to wait, or that no-fault divorce could allow couples to work through a separation without the acrimony that previously accompanied assigning blame. If there is no need to prove fault, there may be less pressure to bring the marriage to an immediate legal end. Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, suggested that wider global and environmental uncertainty was also having an impact. She noted that women remain overwhelmingly the main instigators of divorce and that if people are waiting later to get a divorce, women are waiting longer in order to get divorced. She pointed out that in the 1990s and 2000s, society was all about female empowerment, but there has been a rolling back from that kind of positioning, especially for women, due to various crises. This has reignited a reluctance to go through divorce. The ONS’s same-sex figures give a different set of questions. The median duration of same-sex marriages ending in divorce was 7.5 years for male couples and 6.6 years for female couples in 2025. The figures need to be treated cautiously because same-sex marriage was introduced in England and Wales only in 2014, meaning the pool of marriages that could have reached divorce is still relatively young. However, the ONS says the 6.6-year figure for female couples is nevertheless the highest recorded since the first same-sex divorces in 2015. Maine suggested that same-sex couples might have particular reasons for taking marriage seriously, noting that marriage equality was something many gay people campaigned for hard, and divorce in the LGBT community sometimes carries an additional sense of having failed not just the relationship but the whole community. Brienna Perelli-Harris, a professor of demography at the University of Southampton and director of the UK Generations and Gender Survey, suggested a more fundamental change that might underpin the change: the rise of cohabitation. More than 90% of people in Britain cohabited before marrying, said Perelli-Harris, whose research across 10 European countries found that an increasing proportion of first partnerships were ending before marriage. She suggested that marriage may therefore be becoming a more selective institution, with couples who move in together and discover that the relationship does not work separating without ever marrying, and those who stay together and eventually marry being the couples who are happiest.