3 hours ago
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported last month that the marriage rate is declining. As someone who champions marriage, is married and thinks a wedding is lovely, I think it’s great news.
According to the data, the crude rate of registered marriages per 1,000 residents aged 16 and over fell from 5.5 in 2024 to 5.3 in 2025, with the largest falls occurring among the 25-29s and 30-34s.
Why do I celebrate? Because these figures remind us that Australia is a sensible, progressive nation whose liberal social institutions have given individuals the freedom and opportunity to make the best decisions for our own lives.
This includes exercising our right to divorce, an event also represented in the ABS statistics. Divorces granted rose by 4.1%, the crude divorce rate up from 2.1 to 2.2.
The process of relationship breakdown is always painful, the circumstances causing marriages to fail are often sad, and legal separation is usually a practical nightmare. Yet it was within my own lifetime that Australian law once compelled people in relationships that were unbalanced, dysfunctional, mistrustful, unhappy or loveless to stay married if they couldn’t meet narrow legal criteria to make a case for their divorce before the courts.
As populist right political movements all over the globe push nostalgia politics and regressive social policies along with them, it’s worth remembering that the “good ol’ days” of divorce law in Australia once meant that even couples seeking amicable divorces could be obliged into deceit to obtain them. Before the present “no-fault” divorce framework arrived in 1975, practices like “staged adultery” involved recruiting hotel rooms, photographers and private detectives to meet evidence thresholds for divorce proceedings.
But even better than having the ability to more easily leave an unhappy marriage is not getting into one in the first place – which is why I’m excited about the decrease in the marriage rate, especially as it pertains to age cohorts.
Reporting on the ABS data, The Australian quoted a demographer claiming that “the expensive property market keeps the divorce rate unnaturally low, because it’s just too expensive to split up”. While that may be true, we should resist the temptation to interpret trends in Australia’s divorce and marriage rates within an exclusively material frame. Yes, Deloitte’s global survey of gen Z and millennials found these cohorts are delaying “life decisions” due to financial concerns, but Nick Tebbey from Relationships Australia made a pertinent observation: “people are more aware going into long-term relationships these days of who they are and what they expect out of it, so they are only making a commitment to marriage when they feel genuinely ready.”
Gen Z are a favourite target of chastising concern from elder generations, claiming the kids are lazy, entitled, undisciplined and unemployable; “snowflakes” who are too fragile to cope with adult life; blank, vapid and addicted to phones; lonely and anxious with poor mental health; and sexless.
Yet looking at the ABS data, I wonder if we may have stumbled on to the reality of the “sensible generation”, given gen Z’s habit of delaying marriage exists alongside their lower teen birthrates and lower rates of alcohol use.
As for their recorded anxiety, loneliness and existential tensions, just maybe these are problems you can admit and address when your mid-to-late 20s aren’t otherwise dominated by jobs that exploit you, kids you’re not equipped to parent, relationships you don’t know how to get out of and the consequences of staggeringly stupid decisions made while drunk.
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I am gen X; covered in the scar tissue of a far less sensible youth. I’ve been a longtime, pub-ranting advocate of banning marriage for everyone on the less-wrinkled side of 30. To make an emotional commitment to another person so serious and so total it bears the imprimatur of the state is a tough ask for a rookie player. The complex interchange of shared responsibility threatens to overwhelm me almost daily and I (a) didn’t get married until the age of 47 and (b) genuinely like the guy.
The gen X prophet Hal Hartley suggested in his 1990 film Trust: “A family’s like a gun – you point it in the wrong direction, you’re gonna kill somebody.” I suspect he witnessed the dysfunction of married-too-young family setups just as the rest of my generation did. By the mid-70s, the median age for a first marriage was just 23-24 for men and 21-22 for women, which are the ages of kids I’d still expect to stand up for me on the bus. Note: marriage ages began their climb to present medians of 31 and 30 after 1976, when Australia’s “no fault divorce” legislation came into effect. That year, divorce rates peaked – more than double the number of today’s. It was a backlog effect for a generation of couples finally able to do-over some youthful mistakes.
Of course, very young adults can and do make serious relationships work, but liberalisation of the marriage institution and the attitudes around it mean they can do so through marriage or unmarried cohabitation or living apart together, or they can enjoy a situationship, hooking-up, or any lifestyle variation from no partners to every available partner within walking distance – not from social expectation or cultural pressure but because they know themselves.
Gen Z should celebrate their good judgment and marriage advocates our progress. Marriage has not been rejected. It has been chosen.
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Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
