Divorce Rates Among Gay Men

Women who enter into matrimony with other women go through divorces at nearly double the rate of their gay male counterparts. Overall, 14.4% of same-sex marriages and civil partnerships across England and Wales have concluded in divorce. For males, the proportion is 11%, whereas for females, it's 18%.

Examining same-sex marriage, a relatively recent phenomenon, originating only in 2014, the rates reveal an even sharper contrast: 5% of male same-sex marriages but 10% of female same-sex marriages have ended in divorce. Regarding civil partnerships, the rates stand at 16% and 29% respectively. A greater number of male compared to female couples entered into civil partnerships before the close of 2020 (37,990 versus 30,933), notwithstanding the fact that more women got wed (18,180 male and 23,578 female unions). It is therefore remarkable that a considerably larger number of female couples have already dissolved their marriage or civil partnership in contrast to male couples.

This is not a sudden surge. Even when considering the figures up to 2015 (covering the initial decade of formalization of same-sex relationships) or merely those up to the conclusion of 2013, prior to the advent of equal marriage, for every male couple formally terminating their relationship, there were between 1.63 and 1.76 female couples doing so. The government has disseminated a statistic demonstrating the civil partnership dissolutions each year relative to 1,000 civil partner couples, and there are analogous disparities in the male/female ratios.

This cannot be a coincidence, as the figures exhibit the same trend across the years. There must exist an underlying explanation in the manner and culture gay couples structure their relationships versus how lesbian couples do so. Are gay couples more accepting of an open relationship, permitting sexual encounters outside the confines of the relationship without that being a cause for its cessation? Does this illuminate anything regarding women's perspective towards relationships in general? It would be advantageous for academics to investigate this in depth.

Regrettably, the statistics do not allow for a comparison of same-sex and opposite-sex relationships due to the short timeframe of same-sex civil partnerships and, subsequently, marriages. We cannot automatically presume that all same-sex couples had been together for decades prior to formalizing their relationship, nor can we assume the opposite. With marriages, there's also the complication that individuals may have wed overseas and sought a divorce here, especially for countries from which there's immigration to the UK. The primary sources are Eastern Europe, India, and China. For same-sex couples, a unidirectional movement is likely to be less frequent because the main countries of immigration do not have same-sex marriage or registered partnership.

It is also interesting to observe that after an initial backlog of civil partnership formations in 2006 (14,943), the figures decreased to approximately 6,000 annually until equal marriage was introduced at the end of 2014, and are now around 1,000 per year or fewer. Simultaneously, there are approximately 7,000 same-sex weddings per year in England and Wales. Obviously, the numbers declined during the pandemic, during which people were unable to marry during lockdown. This indicates that civil partnership wasn't precisely what lesbians and gay men desired, but merely a token 'marriage lite' the government offered as a consolation to the LGBT+ community in 2004. Since 2019, opposite-sex couples can register civil partnerships, and although the numbers are modest compared to marriages, they vastly surpass those of same-sex couples (for 2021, 5,692 to 1,039).

The marriage and civil partnership figures are referenced up until the end of 2020, while the divorce and civil partnership dissolution figures go up to the end of 2021. This is because one cannot divorce or dissolve a civil partnership during the first year. This disregards a small number of nullity decrees (13 in total).

The figures stem from marriage, civil partnership, divorce, and civil partnership dissolution statistics, freely available on the Office for National Statistics website. They exclude relationships ended by the death of one partner, those dissolved elsewhere in the UK or overseas, and couples who married or partnered elsewhere and then divorced or dissolved their civil partnership in England and Wales. We also do not yet have the number of conversions of civil partnerships to marriages for 2021, even though this will be marginal because there were only 238 overall in 2020 (146 male and 92 female couples).

Posted in DivorceGay & Lesbian | Tagged DivorceGayLesbiansStatistics

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Alternative Family Law is a legal information website on English family law and not a law firm.

Andrea is a consultant at Josiah-Lake Gardiner Solicitors.

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