Lesbians are Divorcing more than Gay Men

February 19, 2024
Gay & Lesbian Divorce Rates

Women who get married to other women divorce at almost twice the rate gay men do. Overall, 14.4% of same-sex marriages and civil partnerships in England and Wales have ended in divorce. For men the rate is 11%, for women 18%.

For same-sex marriage, which has only been around since 2014, the rates are even starker: 5% of male but 10% of female same-sex marriages have ended in divorce. For civil partnership the rates are 16% and 29% respectively. More male than female couples entered into civil partnerships until the end of 2020 (37,990 and 30,933), although more women got married (18,180 male and 23,578 female couples). It is striking therefore that so many more female couples have already ended their marriage or civil partnership than male couples.

This is not a sudden spike. Even looking at the figures until 2015 (for the first 10 years of formalisation of same-sex relationships) or just at the figures until the end of 2013 before equal marriage was possible, for each male couple formally ending their relationship there were between 1.63 and 1.76 female couples doing so. The government has published a statistic showing the civil partnership dissolutions each year in relation to 1,000 civil partner couples and there are similar differences in the male/female ratios.

This cannot be a coincidence as the figures show the same trend over the years. There must be a reason in the way and culture gay couples arrange their relationships and lesbian couples do. Are gay couples more open to an open relationship so that sexual relations outside the relationship are allowed and are not a reason to end it? Does this tell us something about women’s attitude to relationships altogether? It would be amazing for academics to research this in detail.

Unfortunately, the statistics do not allow us to compare same-sex with opposite-sex relationships because same-sex civil partnership and now marriage has only been around for a short period of time. We cannot assume that all same-sex couples have been together for decades when they formalised their relationship, nor can we assume that they have not. With marriages there is also the issue that people may have married abroad and divorce here, certainly for countries from where there is immigration into the UK. The main ones are in Eastern Europe and India and China. For same-sex couples there is likely to be less of a one-way movement because the main countries of immigration do not have same-sex marriage or registered partnership.

It is also interesting to see that after an initial backlog of civil partnership formations in 2006 (14,943) the figures dropped to around 6,000 a year until equal marriage came in at the end of 2014 and are now around 1,000 a year or less. At the same time there are around 7,000 same-sex weddings a year in England and Wales. Obviously, the figures dropped during the pandemic when people could not get married during lockdown. This shows that civil partnership was not what lesbians and gay men really wanted, but just a token “marriage light” the government offered as a consolation price to the LGBT+ community in 2004. Since 2019 opposite-sex couples can register civil partnerships and although the numbers are low compared to marriages, they far outnumber same-sex couples (for 2021 5,692 to 1,039).

The marriage and civil partnership figures are taken to the end of 2020 and the divorce and civil partnership dissolution figures to the end of 2021. This is because one cannot divorce or dissolve a civil partnership in the first year. This ignores a small number of nullity decrees (13 overall).

The figures come from the marriage, civil partnership, divorce and civil partnership dissolution statistics freely available on the Office for National Statistics website. They ignore relationships which have ended by one partner dying, which have been dissolved elsewhere in the UK or abroad and couples who got married or partnered elsewhere and 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, although this will be marginal because there were only 238 overall in 2020 (146 male and 92 female couples).

EU-Certificate for Divorce in England

July 1, 2016

A post in an online forum for Germans in London recently asked how to get the EU-Form after a divorce in England which the German authorities require. The poster was puzzled, as were the courts. Most family courts do not know about this, but can find out and will get the form signed by a judge and sealed if you fill it in.

The EU-Regulation about divorce jurisdiction and recognition, Regulation 2201/2003 has several forms in the Annexes, which – as the whole regulation – are of course available in all official EU languages. The idea is that you get a form sealed in one EU member state and anyone can then retrieve an empty form in their language, lay them side-by-side and check what each of the points say about the parties, date of divorce etc.

In England once you have a decree absolute, you will need to get the relevant form, which you can download and then send it to the family court where your divorce was pronounced and ask them to get it signed by a judge and sealed. I’d suggest to get at least 3 copies because you might need them for various official business. It is free and easy to get immediately after your divorce. It could be a lot more complicated when you need it 10 years later.

by Andrea Woelke