Roger Bamber, a partner and joint head of the national family law team at Mills & Reeve LLP, explains why it is a happy third anniversary for civil partnerships in the UK:
Since the first civil partnerships were registered on December 21, 2005, there have been 26,787 registered in the UK. What is remarkable is the relatively low number that have since been dissolved. … [T]he number of dissolutions in 2007 (effectively the first year in which they could take place) amounts to just 42. When comparing those figures with the most recent analysis of divorces, there were considerably more new marriages breaking up after a year. In 2005 there were 273,069 marriages in England and Wales. Of those marriages, 3,190 have been dissolved within one year — 1.17 per cent of marriages have failed during this period compared with 0.15 per cent of civil partnerships.
About the possible reasons:
One possible reason is the age of those entering into civil partnerships. The average age of men is 42.8 years old, for women 41.2 years old. Within marriages, those who marry in their twenties are statistically more likely to divorce than those who marry later. Might there be other reasons as well? One theory is that those who have formed homosexual relationships and wish to celebrate a civil partnership may have already have faced the opposition from families or friends. Their relationships will have already been put under pressure and survived by the time they come to tie the knot.
Bamber does not report the rate of dissolution of civil partnerships among younger couples — these might be comparable to marriages. And a considerable amount of divorce is by persons who have been divorced before. To put it another way, since civil partnerships are only recently recognized many of those entering into them were in a relationship that had proven to be stable. In time, civil partnerships may come to look more like marriage in terms of dissolution rates.