Today’s release from the Office for National Statistics reveals that marriage has hit an all-time low.
- The number of weddings in 2015 was 239,020, down 3.4 per cent on the previous year.
- Marriage rates, the proportion of unmarried people who marry in any given year, are now at their lowest level since records began, more than two thirds down from their peak in 1972.
All of this makes for pretty grim reading, just as there were signs that the trend away from marriage had bottomed out. Even if we get a temporary bounce next year from the effects of another Royal wedding, we are not there yet.
The only remotely good news is that weddings continue to rise among the over 45s and there are signs that a slowly rising proportion of us are ever likely to get married based on today’s rates – we’ll do a report on this soon.