More than 90% of married parents are still together after five years

More than 90 per cent of married parents will still be together in five years’ time compared with just three-quarters of cohabiting families, new research has found.

Pro-marriage campaigners say the study proves that an official commitment ‘boosts stability and acts as a buffer against problems for children’.

Figures compiled by the Marriage Foundation suggest that on average 1.5 per cent of married parents split annually, compared to five per cent who live together. 

Based on these rates, taken from Office for National Statistics (ONS) data and a UK Household study, it calculated that over the next five years, 93 per cent of married couples with dependent children would stay together. By comparison, only 75 per cent of the relationships involving cohabiting parents would survive.

Report author Harry Benson, Research Director at the Marriage Foundation, suggested there was more ambiguity in a relationship without official vows but marriage offered a ‘clear signal of commitment’.

‘Relationships thrive when there is clarity and a plan,’ he said. ‘Living together and having children together on their own is not sufficient evidence of a clearly decided and agreed plan to spend the rest of their lives together.

We all want our relationships and families to succeed. But the single biggest enemy of our success is ambiguity. I can be as committed as I like to you but if I’m not absolutely clear that you are as well, it’s bound to affect our relationship.’

Mr Benson predicted that if all cohabiting parents married or entered into a civil partnership up to 227,000 more families would be together by 2025. He claimed that this would ‘avoid the unnecessary experience of family breakdown for between 134,000 and 382,000 children’.

Marriage is still the most popular option for adults with 12.8 million couples currently married or in a civil partnership in England and Wales. This figure includes 4.9 million couples with nine million dependent children aged 16 and under.

But the latest ONS data shows there has been a rise in couples cohabiting in recent years with numbers surging by 25.8 per cent to 3.4 million between 2008 and 2018 – making it the second largest family type. Of this number, 1.3 million have 2.2 million dependent children.

Feminist campaigner Julie Bindel warned that while being married may mean parents are more likely to stay together, it is not necessarily a positive state of affairs. ‘There is lots of research to show that men benefit from marriage but women do not,’ she said. ‘The problem is that women who do not marry lack many of the legal protections, related to property and inheritance for example, afforded to those who are married.

‘In order for society to truly become more equal the Government needs to rectify this anomaly. Why should women have to be shoehorned into an institution that has historically been bad for them in so many ways?’