The seven-year itch has a long cultural pedigree. It gave a Marilyn Monroe film its title, and it still shapes how most people picture a marriage coming apart: somewhere around the seventh anniversary, the story goes, restlessness sets in and the whole thing unravels.
The figures tell a calmer story.
Marriages in England and Wales are lasting longer before they end than at almost any point on record. According to the Office for National Statistics, the median marriage that ended in divorce in 2023 had lasted 12.7 years. That sits just below the 12.9 years recorded the year before, which was the longest the ONS has ever measured. Set against the mid-1980s, when the median dipped below nine years, the direction of travel is hard to miss. Couples who divorce today have, on the whole, been married a good deal longer than their parents’ generation was.
The seven-year figure has not vanished. It remains the single most common length of marriage at the point of divorce, the one duration more couples share than any other. But the most common length and the typical length are different things, and the gap between them is where the real story sits. A cluster of splits around year seven can sit quite happily alongside a rising average, because so many marriages now run well past a decade before they reach a solicitor’s desk.
So why the change? Part of the answer is that people are marrying later, and living together first. The median age at marriage for couples has climbed into the mid-thirties, and by 2022 around nine in ten had cohabited before the wedding. Couples arrive at marriage having already tested the everyday reality of sharing a home, a bank balance and a Sunday morning. Some of the friction that once surfaced in the first years of a marriage now surfaces, and sometimes settles, before the marriage begins.
That trend also shows up in a recent analysis of divorce statistics published by Osbourne Pinner, a firm of solicitors specialising in family law, which notes that fewer marriages are failing in their first decade than were doing so ten years ago. “The longer two lives run together, the more tangled the finances become,” the firm observes, “and the pension is usually the asset nobody thinks to value.” It is a plain point, and an easy one to miss. The house tends to get the attention in a divorce because it is visible and emotive. A pension built over twenty years is often worth more, and far harder to unpick.
The rise of the older divorce
If the early years of marriage have grown more durable, the later ones have not followed the same path. A growing share of divorces now involve couples in their fifties and beyond, people who married young, raised children and reached the far side of that work to find they wanted different things. The children leave, the daily logistics that held two lives in formation fall away, and what is left is a question about the next thirty years rather than the last thirty.
These are the marriages that push the median upward. A couple divorcing after twenty-five or thirty years does more to move the average than a dozen splits at year three. And they are also, in financial terms, the most complicated. Decades of joint life produce decades of joint assets: property, savings, business interests and the pensions that are so easily overlooked.
The shift has a name among family lawyers. The so-called grey divorce, once a rarity, now accounts for a substantial share of the total, and it behaves differently from a younger split. There are rarely young children to arrange around, but there is often a business that grew up alongside the marriage, an inheritance that arrived partway through, and two people contemplating retirement on assets built for one household rather than two. The emotional arithmetic is different too. Ending a marriage at fifty-five is a decision about the years that remain, not the years already spent.
Divorce rates overall have been falling since the 1990s, which cuts against the familiar assumption that marriage is in retreat. Fewer couples are divorcing, and those who do have usually been married longer. Both things are true at once, and neither fits the tidy narrative of a society giving up on marriage.
What no-fault divorce did and did not change
The other force in the background is the law itself. The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020, in force since April 2022, removed the need to blame a spouse for the breakdown of a marriage and introduced, for the first time, a mandatory twenty-week reflection period before a divorce can proceed. The reform was designed to lower the temperature of a split, and on the evidence so far it has changed the texture of divorce more than the volume of it.
What it did not do was make the hard part any easier. Ending the legal marriage has become simpler and less combative. Dividing a life built over more than a decade has not. If anything, the longer marriages that now typify divorce make that second task more demanding, not less, because there is more to divide and more of it is entangled.
There is a quieter consequence too. Because the divorce itself is now so straightforward to start, some couples treat the paperwork as the whole job and never turn to the finances at all. A divorce can be finalised without a financial order ever being made, which leaves the money side legally open long after the marriage has formally ended. For a couple who spent a decade or more building a joint life, that is the part most worth getting right, and the part most often left undone.
The marriage that outlasts the myth
The seven-year itch endures as a phrase because it is neat, and because it flatters our sense that we can predict when things will go wrong. The data is less obliging. The marriages ending today are, more often than not, marriages that lasted, that weathered the early friction the myth warns about, and that came apart much later for reasons the myth never accounts for.
That is a reassuring picture in some ways, and a more demanding one in others. Couples are staying the course longer than they once did. When they do part, they part with more shared history behind them, and more to untangle in front. The story of modern marriage is not one of couples giving up sooner. It is one of couples giving it far longer than the old warnings ever expected.
