Statistics show that marriage isn’t just on the slide here – we’re topping the tables on nearly every measure of marriage’s retreat, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Marriage on the slide

Stats NZ figures released on Monday show 17,481 marriages and civil unions were registered in 2025 – down 3% on 2024, and continuing a slide that stretches back more than half a century. The marriage rate in 2025 was 7.6 per 1,000 eligible people, roughly half what it was in 2000 and “far below its 1971 peak”. As Stuff reports, divorces also ticked up 5% to 7,887 – and for the first time, the divorce rate exceeded the marriage rate, though Stats NZ notes the two figures use different base populations. Meanwhile, as Maddy Croad reported in a piece on the decline of marriage in The Press last year, remarriages have fallen more than 35% since the early 2000s, and around half of all babies born in New Zealand now have parents who are not married.

New Zealand at the top of the table

What’s happening here sits at the extreme end of a global trend. A 2019 UN Women report, ‘Families in a Changing World’, analysed data across eight global regions – and as Bella DePaulo wrote in Psychology Today, Australia and New Zealand topped the table on nearly every measure of marriage’s decline. Among women in their late forties, 14.1% here had never married, against a worldwide average of just 4.3%. The pace of change has also been the fastest: between 1990 and 2010, the share of never-married women in their late forties rose by 9.7 percentage points in Australia and New Zealand – the largest increase of any region.

According to the report, people in Australasia also marry later than in the other regions, at an average age of 31.5 for men and 30 for women. And more than one in five women in their late forties is divorced or separated, again higher than any other region, with the divorce rate among women rising 12.2 percentage points between 1980 and 2010, the largest jump globally.

What the shift means

DePaulo draws on the UN report’s own analysis of what these trends mean in practice. The benefits of later marriage have been clearest for women: the UN report notes the trend “has enabled women to complete their education, gain a stronger foothold in the labor market, and support themselves financially”. Higher divorce rates also carry some counterintuitive positives – the report links them to lower rates of suicide by women, lower incidence of domestic violence, and fewer women murdered by their spouses. The economic picture is bleaker: “ending a relationship typically entails far more adverse economic consequences for women than for men”, the report notes, with women more likely to lose access to marital assets, resources and child custody.

For many couples, the alternative to marriage is not singlehood but cohabitation. As Gráinne Patterson wrote in The Spinoff a couple of years ago, New Zealand’s low marriage rates can be in part attributed to our de facto framework, which gives cohabiting couples most of the same legal protections as marriage. But globally, cohabitation remains less widespread than you might think: in the US, only 13% of unmarried people are cohabiting, meaning most single people are simply living alone. The Pew Research Center projects that by the time today’s young US adults reach 50, one in four will never have been married – a shift DePaulo writes “will transform the social, political, and economic landscape in ways we cannot yet fully imagine”.

The other half who aren’t even looking

It’s not just marriage that’s on the decline, but the entire concept of romantic relationships, according to a series of US surveys. In 2020, Pew asked nearly 5,000 US adults about their attitudes towards dating, and as DePaulo reported in Psychology Today, 50% of single respondents said they were not only uninterested in a committed romantic relationship, but weren’t even interested in going on a date.

Only 14% were actively seeking a serious relationship, a figure that had stayed steady since 2005. Across five similar studies, DePaulo found “one strong and consistent finding: People who have tried marriage before (they are divorced or widowed) are especially unlikely to want to try it again.” Age was a factor, but so was gender – among single people over 40, 71% of women reported no interest in dating, compared to 42% of men.