The year I turned 28, I was a bridesmaid for two of my school friends.
This was the age, as teenagers, we’d considered just right for marriage, informed by romcom characters and the details of celebrity romances playing out in the tabloids.
We deemed thirty, it’s worth noting, as ‘over the hill’. The point after which women fell into the rom-com spinster category and were forced to date Nigel from Accounts because everyone else was already taken.
Neither of those marriages lasted the year. There was the comedown after the wedding; the friction between two people with their own career ambitions; the different expectations of the division of labour in any partnership.
One friend was the main breadwinner, but also did all the cooking and cleaning while her husband watched Match of the Day; their short-lived marriage left her with his bad credit and the bill for the honeymoon.
These marriage splits were the exception to the rule set by a majority of friends whose marriages lasted the year, and the next, and the one after that. But fast-forward seven years and – amid January dashes to sandy beaches or ski slopes and wholesome walks – stress fractures are turning into unbridgeable chasms. What comes next? The era of millennial divorces.
By that, I don’t mean the act of extricating both parties from a joint mortgage (which attracted the ‘millennial divorce’ moniker online). But the severing of the legally binding whole bit, with vows, rings, speeches. The kind that was sealed with 100-or-so guests, at least two bridal outfits, and more normalised (but arguably unnecessary) expense than we see in any other facet of millennial life.
Within my social biome, one woman I know is posting in real time as the paperwork progresses; another is firming up her custody agreement, and a third is planning her second wedding -nearly a decade after her first, but still before she’s 35. One is nearly at the end of a years-long argument over the division of the flat they bought together.
It’s certainly the season for it; the first working Monday of a new year is dubbed ‘divorce day’ for its popularity amongst those starting the process, spurred on by strained Christmases or New Year’s resolutions with ‘leave unhappy relationship’ at the top of the list.
We’ve always moved to a schedule different from older generations. Usually we’re late – later to marry, to buy first homes, to have children. But those divorcing, who all fit squarely within the millennial bracket (27-42) are ahead of schedule, with 44 and 46 the respective average age for women and men to divorce.
Split the difference
If my orbit indicates that millennials are divorcing in increased rates, one look at the data soon rubbishes that theory.
The rate of divorces appears to be falling – and has been since 2000. According to 2021 Office of National Statistics data (the latest available), millennials’ unions are performing better at the 10-year mark then their predecessors’ – only 18.3% have divorced after a decade of marriage versus 23% of Gen Xers and 22% of baby boomers. Women are significantly more likely to petition for divorce than men, with the top reasons being ‘unreasonable behaviour’ and adultery.
There are as many different reasons to get divorced as there are different relationships. But for many of my peers, the pandemic skip - losing a few years that would otherwise have been filled with the big life steps that come thick and fast in your thirties and forties – left their self-perception out of step with their reality. This, for many, altered the way we plan our futures.
For me, it meant the loss of that time in my early thirties that I would otherwise have filled with nights out, dating, and last hoorah holidays with friends before they had children. I’m nearly 36, still single, and on the clock if I decide that I want a child - but I feel the lack of those fun years, after the hard slog of my low-income, high-stress twenties focused on work. I feel too young to be married - and some women I know who are married feel too young for their suddenly-middle-aged lives, which sped forward in those pandemic years.
They are my ‘split era’ contemporaries. Some relationships that worked amongst busy backdrops - 9-5 office jobs, travel, nights out separately and together - suddenly didn’t when everything else was stripped away. Something underscored by the divorce rate, which increased by 20% between 2019-2020.
Being a household without the rest of your village showed up flaws that had been glossed over before. Those who married for security and stability, or at least stayed married for those reasons, or because they couldn’t afford to divorce, were suddenly forced to spend all their time together.
The heterosexual marriages in my orbit have fared the worst, hastened along by the extra household labour and childcare responsibilities that women married to men took on during the pandemic. Some marriages might have lasted if not for the shared trauma that was those long months without childcare, without external support.
And a few break-ups seemingly had little to do with the relationships themselves, and more to do with people for whom those stagnant pandemic months brought on an early midlife crisis. To the extent that they were rushing to quit their jobs and go backpacking (or sleep with multiple other partners, in one instance) the moment they were legally allowed to.
One wedding, delayed by the pandemic, was cancelled with less than a week’s notice. Eight months later, the groom has already proposed to someone else. If that marriage had gone ahead when originally planned, I wonder if it would’ve lasted - whether they just wanted a clean slate with someone new, without the baggage and history.
But I do wonder, after that last minute cancellation, the heartbreak, the explanations, the dividing up of a shared life, why you’d be so quick to get engaged again. Is it green grass syndrome? Does he really just ‘know’ that it’s right this time, as the films tell us we will? Or, if he really does just want to be married, why?
Hitched? Please…
It’s not only pinning down the motivations of that serial groom that leaves me wondering what marriage really offers to millennials.
When you look at the statistics, the appeal of marriage for my generation is – like divorce rates – on the decline. And yet…the wedding invitations (the first timers; the sequels) roll in at a rate that continues to dominate our calendars.
We have never had so much freedom to chart the course of a life that feels personally meaningful; and we have never had so much discussion around where that meaning might lie. Choosing to be childfree, for my generation, has become a normalised choice rather than an assumed failure – with having children increasingly ‘opt in’ than ‘opt out’. On social media, DINKS (dual income, no kids) share videos of lives rich in travel, with dinners out, and healthy savings accounts.
And, if we do want children, marriage is no longer a prerequisite for having a socially-acceptable family life. Last year, more babies were born to unmarried couples than to married couples by the largest number since records began.
While it remains the preference of the majority, you don’t even necessarily need a partner to make motherhood happen. Friends of mine are freezing their eggs in the hope that they’ll find someone suited to parenthood in the years to come, while others are choosing to children alone via IVF.
Staying married is no longer seen as the only responsible thing to do, even when there are children involved. The collective disgust at right-wing Conservative MP (and evangelical Christian) Danny Kruger’s framing of marriage as teeth-gritting duty said as much.
‘[The] normative family - held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children…is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society,’ he told May’s National Conservative (or ‘NatCon’) conference.
To have and to hold on
Further muddying the waters of matrimony’s continued appeal is the fact many millennials have their own experiences of marriages that don’t work – or at least, not ‘til death’ as promised.
Our boomer and Gen X parents brought about a divorce rate peak. My generation are, statistically, the children of divorce - the children that our parents were told to think of. My own parents' marriage - 46 years and counting - is one of the best and happiest partnerships I’ve seen. But they’re in the minority.
Many of my friends were raised mostly by their mothers, who never remarried after sticky divorces (often with infidelity on the father’s side). Lots had there-but-not-really fathers who were always at work and didn’t want to be bothered the rest of the time.
One friend’s mother looked forward to her husband’s retirement for years, only to find that he has no interest in travel, day trips, or even joining her for a long walk to the pub now that he can. She seems lonelier in her marriage than many of the unmarried women I know.
Perhaps the stubborn allure of marriage is thanks to what sociologist William Ogburn termed ‘cultural lag’ – the tendency of attitudes and values to change more slowly than the material conditions that underlie them.
I put the question to Lucy Clyde - a psychotherapist, counsellor and host of the How To Cope podcast. She believes it may ( in-keeping with our know-it-all stereotype) have something to do with millennials thinking that we could simply just do marriage better than our forebears.
‘Millennials have come of age in a world where it could feel as though some of the confusion around sex and relationships has been dispelled,’ she tells me.
‘I suspect that the information climate may have helped a generation feel as though they had the answers and were better equipped to succeed than their parents. And, in a way, that’s a necessary illusion.’
‘The popularity of marriage, in spite of divorce statistics, may also be in part due to the enduring idea that marriage – as opposed to cohabiting – provides a degree of security,’ she adds. That word ‘security’ is an especially salient one for my generation, for whom insecurity reigns in every sphere from jobs to housing.
That marriage is associated with greater economic security is well established. There’s the Marriage Allowance that can reduce a couple’s tax by £252, annually; spouses can transfer money and assets between the other, tax-free and – on a micro level – split the rent and food shop.
The latter is a source of envy for me, at least when the splitting of finances is mirrored by the true splitting of the labour needed to run a household. As someone who is the sole breadwinner for my household of one, I’m envious of people who have someone to remember to buy lightbulbs, or make them soup when they’re ill.
Romance and realism
The economic and logistical benefits of marriage aren’t the only reason that – five years on from the threshold at which my teenage self deemed ‘over the hill’ – I haven’t ruled marriage out for myself.
I love celebrating with my friends at their weddings and marking their marriage milestones with them. I love being in love. I still rewatch those nineties romcoms. (Isn’t it telling that so many ended with big, beautiful weddings, but very few of them bothered to show us what came next…)
In my twenties, when I was more amenable and less sure of what I did and didn’t like, I thought of marriage as a matter of when, not if.
But at 35, now that my married friends have left the honeymoon period and are grappling with mortgages, children, in-laws, money and conflicting work schedules, the rose-tinted glasses and well and truly off.
Even with the best partner in the world, the sacrifice can be exhausting and demoralising. And with less-than-brilliant partners, I’ve seen weaponised incompetence, husbands whose jobs and social lives come first; fathers who’ve never washed a babygrow.
Being there for my friends as marriages have flourished – and floundered - has helped me look upon the next steps in my own story with a little more gentleness. Just as being a single woman in your 30s and beyond isn’t shorthand for losing the game of life, marriage doesn’t automatically confer success and a happy ending.
My generation is encouraged to leave friendships that become problematic, to walk away from jobs that ask too much of us. We’re encouraged to reframe failure as a path to growth. Yet, we’re told that marriages are work, that we need to stick with them, even if they’re making us miserable. I’m not the only one who isn’t buying it.
So, amid January’s divorce wave, I’ll congratulate those in my circle with the guts to choose a different path to the one they had started to travel down – just as wholeheartedly as when I toast those whose summer 2024 wedding invitations have made it to my mantelpiece.
