Name: Divorce: Why are fewer marriages ending? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2024-11-16T14:44:48.000Z
Duration: 17 min 10 s
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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings, from the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.

They say that breaking up is hard to do, and that seems to be particularly true in many Western countries, where divorce rates have been steadily falling for the last few decades.

On today's episode, we look at some of the main reasons people decide to get divorced, or never get married at all.

We consider the effects on families, finances and emotional wellbeing, at a time that some people say is the most stressful in life.

With me today is Joanna Gosling, a long-time BBC journalist and presenter who now works as a mediator for couples considering divorce, and Marina Adshade, who is a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, and regularly contributes to BBC programmes.

Joanna, you sadly left us here at the BBC to pursue a career in mediation.

But why did you choose to work in what must at times be really acrimonious, really tense, that environment, working with couples who are divorcing?

Yes, it obviously can be high conflict, it is high conflict, it's dealing with people at the most difficult time of their lives often.

But I do it because I really care about supporting people through those difficult times and getting them as much as I can through to the other side, so that they can put it behind them and, you know, live their life, a new life, a changed life, but as they want it to be.

And Marina, you're at the Vancouver School of Economics.

I've been doing this, gosh, going back like 15 years when I decided to teach an economics course on sex and love for my students, just to get them interested in economics.

So the issues that we're going to be talking about today, I've been working on for a long time.

And it's, you know, it is absolutely an economic story, because we know that economics has a big role to play in why people both marry and divorce.

But also because economists have been working on this going back to the 1970s, you know, these issues of why people marry, why people divorce.

We're going to delve into a lot of these issues.

But I was surprised to hear that in Western countries, divorce rates are actually on the decline.

People are getting married when they're older.

People who marry when they're older are more likely to stay married.

So this is going to play a big role in it.

We've seen a big change in what I call marriage equality, where it used to be that people who were educated and had high incomes married at roughly the same rate as the people who had lower incomes and less education.

So now we're seeing mostly educated people getting married relative to people who are less education and those people tend to stay married.

So a lot of it has to do with the composition of who is marrying today.

But if you look at countries like India and China, we're seeing divorce rates go up.

I'm actually not surprised that divorce rates appear to be increasing in those countries because those countries that are a different stage of development than many of the countries in the West.

And we did see an increase in divorce rates, say, over the 20th century.

So you saw an increase in divorce rates and then a decline.

And you would expect in countries like India and China, you would have the same pattern.

There was an interesting thing they did in China where they introduced this cooling off period.

Does that work when the government intervenes?

If nothing changes in the dynamic between two people being told that they've got to cool off and wait a bit longer, I don't think it's going to make them suddenly realize that they want to be together.

It might be an idea for states to invest in communication programs for these couples because that's invariably why relationships fall apart.

And so unless something shifts in that regard, as I say, being told that you've got to stay in it a bit longer for whatever reason isn't going to probably change anyone's mind.

Because historically divorce is very low in India, but we are starting to see an increase.

So, you know, historically in India, many, many marriages were arranged marriages.

You know, if you go back to the 19, even to the 1990s, more than 90 percent of marriages were arranged marriages.

And arranged marriages do have a tendency to have a significantly lower divorce rate.

I mean, that might be because, you know, in an arranged marriage, people recognize that they have to work harder to, you know, to work on that communication and forming that they come from more traditional families where divorce isn't really an option.

So we've seen a decline in arranged marriages in India.

And at the same time, you start seeing an increase in divorce.

I don't actually see divorce as a bad thing or even an increase in divorce as a bad thing.

I mean, there was a lot of people in the West when divorce became easier in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There was a rush to divorce at that point because people were in deeply unhappy marriages and it gave them a chance to get out of those marriages.

There is research that's being done in the States that says that access to divorce has saved the lives of thousands of women.

And I'm guessing in India, it's exactly the same.

Women in South Asia often talk about the shame or the stigma that was attached to their ex-wife.

Reham Khan talked about the view of divorced women in Pakistan.

When a woman gets divorced, I think it's very easy for a community to then jump on the bandwagon and demonize her.

But the woman doesn't have to be a criminal to be going through a divorce or becoming a divorcee is almost like a license for anyone to just start maligning the woman.

That now, do you think there is still a sense of shame that people feel or a stigma around being divorced?

I think it would depend on different societies because there will be, obviously, as we've been hearing, different cultural pressures to, first of all, get married and stay married and then the societal pressures.

And even in countries where divorce is accepted and there sort of shouldn't be a shame or a stigma, I think that just anecdotally, people often do still feel that.

Marina, how much of a change is there, though, because people in the West particularly are getting married later?

People are looking for something different in marriage.

And, you know, I think personally, I think that love is way more important part of marriage now than it was in the past.

They wait until they find somebody that they're really compatible with.

They wait and find somebody who's going to be their best friend and is going to be a good parent and is going to fulfill all of those needs.

And because of that, people are more likely to stay married because they are choosing more carefully.

We've been talking about divorce rates falling in the West.

Egypt's have more than doubled since the process was made easier for women in 2000.

And in a country like Kuwait, more than half of marriages are ending in divorce.

That's a rate that's higher than America's.

And Marina, I wanted to ask you about the pattern of divorce now, whether that's changing in these countries, are we actually seeing it's the women who are often initiating?

You know, I think this is largely always being true.

But certainly all the areas that we have data from, it's women are way more likely to initiate a divorce when women are more likely to initiate.

And then when they're surveyed later, they're more likely to say that they were glad they got divorced.

Men are much more likely to say they regret the divorce.

So it seems to be women's choices that are driving a lot of divorce.

Of course, this is universally true, but it's true for something like 70 percent of all divorces.

Well, let's dig a bit deeper into why people are getting divorced and what makes divorce more likely.

Marina, there must be this breaking point moment for many people.

What do you think of the issues that can lead up to that moment?

Personally, I think that one of the main reasons where people get divorced is that they have had a significant change in circumstances and they, you know, they might have had the ideal arrangement at the time that they got married.

But over the course of people's lives, things change.

And I think this is true for a lot of marriages because people's situation changes over their lives.

Maybe they want children and maybe they change their minds.

Maybe they want to live in one location and the other person doesn't want to live in that location.

And I think it's those things that are just very difficult to resolve where it no longer becomes the arrangement that people entered into originally.

And a lot of what I come across is people whose children are that bit older and they'll suddenly be like, we have just been focused on the children and focused on everything else and not focusing on each other.

And then there's that moment where it's just like, actually, what is there left between us?

And that's when the divorce will often hit.

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Divorce: Why are fewer marriages ending? - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service

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