Fact or Fiction?
50% of marriages end in divorce
I was listening to a podcast earlier this year when I heard the Aussie interviewee quote that “50% divorce of marriages end of divorce”.
This struck me.
I remember hearing that exact stat when I was in primary school (usually from the same kind of people who told me I had to send a particular email chain to 3 different people or I’d drop dead); so it seemed odd to think that that 50% stat for divorce hadn’t budged in either direction for 20 years.
Aside from being depressing to think about, it just seemed impossible to me to have such a stubborn, unchanging statistic given the huge amount of evolution we’ve seen in relationship and marriage stats in every other area from the age people are getting married to the number of couples choosing to get married at all.
A few months later I got an email survey from a celebrant group quoting that same stat – “1 in 2 marriages end in divorce”...
When asked where they got their data, they said they’d “heard it somewhere, did some Googling, found something that supported it and off [they] went!”.
This time though, I was armed with the facts, and the truth is, this stat has NEVER been correct; not now, and not 20 years ago. But we millennials seem to carry it with us like it’s God’s own will to doom half our relationships forever more. But those findings were from incorrectly interpreted data from research where the stat was misleadingly generalised. The truth is that here in Australia in 2025 the divorce rate is much closer to 30%. Some would argue that that’s still pretty grim stats, but it’s a far cry from the 50% millennials have quoted since childhood.
So where did this 50% we’ve all been quoting come from?
This figure has been widely cited, especially in the US, since the 1970s and 80s. It originated from a rough projection on US data: that if current divorce trends at the time continued indefinitely, then eventually half of all marriages might end in divorce. But this was all based on extrapolation, not actual longitudinal marriage tracking.
What the heck does that mean?
It means that the 50% divorce statistic came from guessing what might happen in the future based on short-term patterns (that’s extrapolation)—not from actually following a group of married couples over time to see what really happened in their marriages (which is longitudinal tracking).
In Australia, the number has never been as high as 50%, and nor in the US where this projection was made.
According to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS):
In recent years, around 30%–33% of Australian marriages have ended in divorce.
The "divorce rate" is often reported as the crude divorce rate (divorces per 1,000 people), which has been stable or slightly declining in Australia.
So now at last, in our 30s and 40s, we can finally put that stat in the same graveyard we sent dial up internet, curses chainmail, and MySpace to.
But 30% still feels pretty grim, right?
Well, as someone who does champion marriage and weddings, and believes in the work I do of marrying people, I do want to end on a positive note for all who still feel despair about the 30% stat.
Although divorce rate has increased since the 70s, remember that the divorce rate was once lower, not because people were more happily married, but because of stigma and also a society set up to make women less independent.
Divorce rates in Aus are now on the decline. This is suggested to be for a whole host of reasons including couples getting married later in life; couples taking longer to choose a partner and living with them prior to marriage; some people choosing not to get married at all if it doesn’t suit their own lifestyle or beliefs; marriage being more inclusive to couples regardless of their gender; and the list goes on.
These all suggest that the way we approach love, relationship, and marriage is in fact moving in a positive direction.
So, next time someone wants to use stats to de-romanticise marriage, ask them if they’re really looking at the whole picture, or just focussing on the numbers which supports their argument.