Amid the champagne, love and laughter of her wedding day, one of Kate Murphy's older friends struck a sour note. “It's ridiculous that you're getting married at this age,” she said. “I mean, it's like Mars bars, you like them now, but how do you know that you'll like them in ten years? And at least with a Mars bar you can always change to a Twix.”
At the time, Kate was 24. Six years later she was divorced. Since 1971, the divorce rate has doubled and the number of marriages has halved. In 2005 just 244,000 couples got married, the fewest for 111 years.
In the most recent figures, however, the overall divorce rate in England and Wales dropped for the third year in a row from 12.2 per thousand married people in 2006 to 11.9 in 2007. While fewer people were tying the knot, those who did seemed more determined that it should last.
Good news then for every group except one : the twentysomethings. It emerged that for the sixth successive year, according to the Office of National Statistics, men and women aged 30 and under had the highest divorce rate of all age groups, at 26.8 per thousand. So why do younger people seem more predisposed to divorce?
Kate laughs at the outspokenness of her then 40-year-old friend, and says she thinks that society is partly to blame. “It's the culture we live in. We're obsessed with cooking and gardening TV programmes, and how to create the perfect home and lifestyle. And people in their twenties are duped by this, as society almost forces them to care about Agas and how to lay your own gravel path earlier than they should. So they commit too young,” she says. “The trouble is that once you've begun to climb the career ladder, you find that you've changed and your priorities have changed. When you get older, you know yourself better and you push yourself more and sometimes you find that the other person has grown up in a different way.”
Penny Mansfield, director of the One plus One marriage and partnership research agency, agrees. There is no definitive reason why the marriages of young people run into trouble in the UK, but research has shown that the later people get married, the less likely they are to divorce. This is often, she says, because they can make more balanced decisions.
“Generally if a woman waits to get married, she'll be more economically stable and less likely to marry for money. Also, as she gets older, she tends to choose her partner more astutely. When she's young she might think about what she wants in a man, not what he's like as a person, and therefore will place more emphasis on sexual attractiveness.”
The average age of men and women marrying for the first time is now 31 and 29 respectively, so the number of younger people saying “I do” is comparatively low. Sasha Hutchins was one of them. Having dated for four years, she married when she was 28 and moved to the US, where her husband had been promoted to a high-flying banker's job on Wall Street. In London they had lived apart with flatmates and, until they married, had never even gone supermarket shopping together. But in New York she had few friends, no green card and overnight the balance of power shifted.
“He had a full-on job and, although I'd had a job in marketing before, I now worked three hours a day as a secretary. Having been very independent, I suddenly had to rely on him emotionally, financially and physically. Instead of growing closer, we grew apart. He started to resent me and my neediness, as more pressure was piled on him at work.” They saw a marriage counsellor once. But he could not help and within two years the marriage was over.
The liberalised divorce laws are the real reason that so many young people are divorcing today, according to Steven Carter, psychotherapist and author of Men Who Can't Love, the book that coined the term “commitmentphobia”.
“These are the children of the first generation of divorced parents, who've grown up, married and are now divorcing themselves. So regardless of how much they ‘believe' in marriage, history tells them that marriages fail,” he says. “That's left behind a lot of bitterness and an unconscious belief that no matter how hard you work at it, the role model failed, so it won't work for you.”
According to Carter, society used to provide the glue to keep even damaged marriages together, by stigmatising spinsters and bachelors, and by organising the community around the family. But once divorce became easier in the early 1970s there was less internal or external pressure on a couple to try to work things out when a relationship came under strain. So inevitably, in today's throw-away society, he argues, couples give up and walk away.
While Carter's assessment for society might seem dire, in America, the phenomenon of young people marrying and divorcing within a couple of years, without having children, has taken hold to such an extent it has even spawned a name - starter marriages.
The term was coined by Pamela Paul in her 2002 book The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. She argued that Generation X-ers were so disturbed by the tumult in their lives, that they craved the stability of marriage that their parents had spurned.
Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie and Billy Piper are well-known examples of women who seem to “have it all” - great careers, homes and friends - who married in their twenties and subsequently divorced. Peaches Geldof, 19, who wed her 23-year-old boyfriend Max Drummey in Las Vegas in August, recently admitted: “I'm realistic, you can't ignore divorce rates. Every friend of mine has parents who are divorced. I didn't go into it with Max thinking, ‘This is going to last forever,' but I did go into it thinking, ‘I love him right now and I know that I'll continue to love him for a long while'. He thinks the same.”
It is unclear whether the trend for starter marriages has carried across the Atlantic in the same way but Paula Hall, a relationship psychotherapist with Relate, and author of How To Have a Healthy Divorce (published by Vermilion next month), insists that the UK's Generation X is not predestined for divorce.
Although children undoubtedly learn from their parents, she says there is no reason why they should be more likely to divorce as, arguably, they have seen the damage that can be done and will therefore work harder to avoid it.
“There's a strong argument that those from separated parents will try the hardest and be more committed to make a relationship work...and that they are more likely to seek help earlier,” she says, “Because we know that happy relationships don't happen automatically and that lower divorce rates don't necessarily equal happy marriages.”
Kate Murphy also takes strong exception to Carter's doom-laden analysis. As the daughter of divorced parents, she says that she was determined to not be another statistic in her family and was disappointed when she failed.
She takes solace, however, from her mother's second marriage which has lasted 23 years and appears as firm and loving as ever. So much so that Kate is also to embark on her second marriage, at 33.
“To a degree it's luck, because I also know people who have been happily married since they were 16. They grew together as they grew up,” she says.
“But this time it feels right. And I'm going to use all the tools I've learnt from my first marriage, what my annoying habits are and what I've got to change because, as we know, it takes two.”
*Some of the names in this article have been changed.
End of a marriage
I was 18 when I met David in a local club. My father was moving to Spain with his second wife and I was not invited. My mother had died years before, so I was living on my own, looking for security. He was 22, working for his father as a plumber, and I was a receptionist. We got together and then moved in with his parents three years later to save for a home. We bought a house in 2004 and became engaged. We married in January on my Mum's birthday. It was a big white wedding with 200 guests and my Dad gave me away. Perhaps the only indication that things were wrong was that I hyperventilated on the way to the church.
I had been having doubts for a year before we married. Things were very routine. It felt as if we had no life, sitting in front of the TV at weekends and never going out - it was very middle-aged. He couldn't be bothered with anything. The physical side of our relationship went down the pan. Four months after we married, I went to counselling. He wouldn't come and it was expensive, so I only did it once. We never argued, but after six months we were sleeping in separate rooms. That August I asked him to move out, hoping that he might fight for me. He didn't and instead lived with a friend and reverted to being one of the lads.
Obviously I blame him, but I think his parents are also a little responsible. He'd always had such an easy life. He worked for his dad and his mum pampered him. He never had to grow up.
Both of our parents had been happily married and so was his brother. We were both disappointed that our marriage failed but I'm glad that I'm young enough to have another shot and that I don't have children, as that would have made it far harder.
Emily Munroe
Improving the odds
Don't marry before 30. You are less likely to outgrow someone.
Marry your equal. You're in for a rocky time if one person dominates.
Wait a year before marrying.
Marry someone with similar goals. Don't wait until after the wedding to discuss having children and living in Orkney.
Make sure you can talk to each other - about everything.
Base your decision on what he or she is, not what you want him or her to be.
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