4.2.2 - Changing Patterns of Separation, Divorce, and Remarriage

Patterns and concepts

Sociologists begin by separating legal divorce from the wider idea of marital breakdown. Divorce is the formal ending of a marriage, but relationships can also break down through separation or through an empty shell marriage, where the couple remain legally married while the relationship has lost its emotional substance. This distinction matters because official divorce figures only capture the legal end of marriage, not every unhappy or collapsing relationship.

In Britain, divorce rose sharply after the late 1960s, especially once the Divorce Reform Act 1969 came into effect in 1971. Annual divorce totals subsequently fluctuated, so any claim about a recent rise or fall needs a dated series and a clear denominator. However, a lower divorce rate does not automatically mean stronger families, because fewer people marry and some unhappy couples separate without divorcing.

The legal context helps explain why divorce became more visible. The Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 made legal help more affordable, the Divorce Reform Act shifted the focus onto irretrievable breakdown, and the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 consolidated and simplified the legal framework. Sociologists usually argue that these laws did not create unhappy marriages. Instead, they reduced the barriers that had previously kept some people in marriages that had already broken down.

An important exam point follows from this: rising divorce is not identical to rising rejection of marriage. It can also show that more people are willing and able to leave marriages that no longer work.

Explaining rising divorce

Several social changes made divorce more likely. First, the stigma attached to divorce has weakened, so ending a marriage is less likely to be seen as shameful failure. Second, secularisation has reduced the religious pressure to remain married at all costs. Third, women are more likely to have their own income, qualifications, and legal rights, which makes it easier to leave oppressive or deeply unsatisfying marriages. These shifts changed both the opportunities for exit and the expectations people brought into marriage.

Ronald Fletcher argued that higher divorce does not prove that marriage has lost value. His point was almost the reverse: in modern society people expect marriage to provide emotional closeness, companionship, and personal fulfilment. Because expectations are higher, people are less likely to stay in a marriage that falls short. From this functionalist view, divorce can rise because marriage matters more as a source of emotional satisfaction.

Feminists put power at the centre of the explanation. They argue that many marriages used to be held together by women’s economic dependence and by patriarchal expectations about obedience, care, and domestic labour. As women gained access to employment and feminist ideas spread, more women became willing to challenge inequality inside marriage. Rising divorce can therefore be read as evidence that women are less prepared to tolerate patriarchal relationships.

Anthony Giddens uses the idea of the pure relationship to argue that intimacy is now more contingent. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim make a similar argument through individualisation: tradition has less power to hold couples together, so relationships depend more on negotiation and choice. On this view, divorce rises because external constraints such as religion, stigma, and economic dependence have weakened.

The New Right gives a much more critical interpretation. Charles Murray argues that easier divorce contributes to the broken family, weakens stable socialisation, and increases lone-parent households. For the New Right, the problem is not simply that marriages end, but that family instability harms children and social order.

A useful way to organise these perspectives is to compare what each thinks rising divorce actually means.

The strongest sociological explanation combines these factors. Legal change matters, but mostly because cultural change, individualisation, and changing gender relations made more people want to use the legal exit that the law provided.