Why It Matters Marriage and Civil Partnerships
Summary
In relation to residents in your neighbourhood aged 16 and above, we have measured the prevalence of “conjugal unions” or combination of formal marriages and consensual unions.
Interpretation
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Walulel Percentage (%) of Married Persons | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that are currently within a homosexual or heterosexual, civil or religiously recognised marriage. |
| Walulel Percentage (%) of Persons in a Registered same-sex Civil Partnership | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that have formed civil partnerships. |
| Walulel Percentage (%) of Persons separated-but still legally Married or still legally in a same-sex Civil Partnership | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that currently self-identify as separated but are still legally recognised as married /within a registered civil-partnership. |
| Walulel Percentage (%) of Persons who are Single have never Married and/or never registered a same-sex Civil Partnership | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that are classed as single by virtue of their never having been in a legally recognised homosexual or heterosexual union. |
| Walulel Percentage (%) of Persons who are Widowed or a Surviving Partner from a Marriage or same-sex Civil Partnership | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that have outlived their spouse or partner to a marriage/civil partnership. |
| This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that have outlived their spouse or partner to a marriage/civil partnership | This tells you the percentage of all the people in your neighbourhood that have formally ended a marriage/civil-partnership by way of divorce and annulment or dissolution on the award of a decree of nullity. |
Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective
Commercial inhabitants will be interested to know the marital status of the residents living in their immediate vicinity because this will inform them of how traditional or otherwise the area is. For example, if the majority of persons aged 30-44 in an area are married it is likely to tell you that the residents do not live an “alternative” lifestyle and therefore would respond better to corresponding goods and services.
For example, if you are going to start an all-night cereal café, a neighbourhood of London with one of the highest proportions of married couples is unlikely to be the area where such an offering will be most successful. El - SALE Conventional forms of accommodation and housing will also be most widely taken up in areas where a high proportion of the aforementioned age group are married and vice versa - e.g. commune-style living is far rarer in areas that are heavy in this demographic. If a high number of people cohabit when they are separated or divorced this can also tell you something about competition for housing in the area.
Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective
Residents will be interested to know the marital status of their immediate neighbours because this will tell them how conventional or otherwise their neighbourhood is. Areas with high proportions of people who are married or in a civil partnership will be likely to contain neighbours who come and go at fairly standard times and are more likely to want to contribute to the local community.
This is probably the more ideal set up for someone in the same stage of life, whereas if you live in a flat share you will want the amenities that are more commonly required by people how also live in the same circumstances, such as more late-night services and a higher degree of late-night entertainment.
Similarly, high rates of divorce and widowing in the immediate vicinity may indicate particular local issues causing disproportionate pressures on marriages or life-expectancies such as poor housing standards, low levels of employment locally and low levels of job availability locally.
(Photograph: Blavou, Wikimedia Commons)
General Commentary
Across England and Wales, the percent of single people who have never been married rose in proportion from 30 per cent in 2001 to 35 per cent in 2011. London had eight of the ten local authorities with the highest proportions of single people in the adult population in 2011; the highest was Islington at six in ten people which is owing to London having a higher proportion of young persons relative to the rest of the population than the rest of England and Wales. Unsurprisingly given these statistics, seven of the ten areas with the lowest proportions of married people across England and Wales were within London, with the lowest proportion of all being found in Islington where only one in four of the adult population were married. Again, this appeared to be owing to the particularly young demographic in this area; the overall adult median age was 33 which was lower than in other areas of London. The only other areas of the country with such a young demographic were university towns. Conversely, civil partnerships were more common in London than anywhere else in England and Wales – nine out of ten of the areas where they were most common were in London. In contrast with their low rate of marriage, parts of Islington had the highest number of civil partnership formations in England, and parts of Southwark were not far behind.
Demographers are interested in marriage rates because they may hold the key to the perceived housing crisis – that is the perceived undersupply of housing in the capital. Actually, based on the numbers, if the rate of marriage breakdown was slowed and reversed to pre-1960s levels then the current housing stock would be more than adequate for the number of households, but separation and divorce generally cause households to fragment, requiring two dwellings suddenly where one sufficed before.
Given the higher proportion of singletons in London, one may be surprised to learn that the lowest rates of divorce are in London. All of these areas, which included Tower Hamlets and Harrow, had a higher proportion of young persons relative to the rest of the population than average with the adult median age ranging from 31.6 in areas of Tower Hamlets to 42.4 in parts of Harrow. These areas also had higher proportions of Indian persons and the lowest proportions of White British persons, which might (according to some) have a bearing on attitudes towards divorce. Furthermore, the areas of England and Wales with the lowest number of widows were all in London, which was again a factor of the young age structure of many London neighbourhoods.
Nine of the top ten local authorities with the highest concentrations of those who were married or in a civil partnership but not living with their spouse or civil partner were found in parts of London, with the highest percentage being areas of the City of London, where almost one in five were married or in a civil partnership but not living with their other half. In highly urban areas such as these, the driver behind this statistic is likely to be people locating themselves in the City for work.
Trivia
In the eighteenth century England, the age of marriage without parental consent was raised to 21 to stop a trend in the marrying of young girls. At this time in Scotland, the age of marriage without parental consent was 12 for girls and 14 for boys, and anyone could marry a couple “by declaration”-they did not need to be ordained. Consequently, many young English couples would elope to Gretna Green, the first town one reached over the Scottish border, to be married.
History
1753 marked the year that marriage came under the purview of the state as it became a legal requirement to be married in a church or chapel by a minister otherwise the union was void. Couples also had to issue a formal marriage announcement-called banns - or obtain a licence.
The Marriage Act of 1836 allowed for non-religious civil marriages to be held in registry offices and for people to marry in their own places of Worship – until this point regardless of religion the Church of England had to oversee the marriage.
Before 1858, divorce was rare and required an act of Parliament. It was only in 1858 that divorce could be carried out via legal process. Even then divorce was too expensive for most people, and there was the added challenge for wives of proving “aggravated” adultery - that their husbands had been guilty of cruelty, desertion, bigamy, incest, sodomy or bestiality.
The percentage of opposite-sex couples marrying through religious ceremonies has decreased steadily over time. In 1900, religious ceremonies accounted for 85 per cent of all marriages and by 1980 this had fallen to 50 per cent. Since 1992, civil marriages have increasingly outnumbered religious marriages every year. In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of the first more widespread contraceptives meant that marriage and procreation did not have to go hand in hand, at least within the Anglican and Church of England religions. In the 1960s divorce suddenly became more common after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, because couples could cite marital breakdown as the reason for the split rather than having to go to lengths to gain evidence of one of the previous grounds.
The Marriage Act of 1949 as amended by the 1983 Act gave legal recognition to Jewish or Quaker marriages in any building as long as they took place under a registrar’s certificate or licence and the certificate was delivered to the registering officer, and to Roman Catholic, non-Church of England and Muslim weddings as long as they took place within a certified building. Many couples do not necessarily wish to get married within these buildings, and these buildings are not always certified so they will need to register their marriage in a registry office after the event. The first ceremonies under the Civil Partnerships Act took place in Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales in December 2005.
Marriages of same-sex couples were first allowed in England and Wales on 29 March 2014. Same-sex couples in a civil partnership have been able to convert their existing civil partnership into a marriage, if they so desired, from 10 December 2014. In the year that same sex marriage was introduced, nearly 6,000 same-sex couples got married and nearly 8,000 converted their civil partnership into a marriage.