Study: Marriage Does Not, In Fact, Keep Couples Together

Don’t tell Maggie Gallagher, but that thing she’s working to protect isn’t much of a guarantee of stability for heterosexuals: “A new study out of the U.K. concludes there is no evidence that walking the aisle makes a relationship more stable. … The study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies looks at a survey of British children born in 2000 and their mums and pops. Researchers did find that parents who were merely cohabitating when their baby was born were three times more likely to split by their child’s fifth birthday — but ‘there is little evidence that marriage per se is the cause of greater stability between parents,’ a press release explains. When controlling for differences between the two groups — namely that cohabitating parents are ‘typically younger, less well off, less likely to own their own homes, have fewer educational qualifications and are less likely to plan their pregnancies than married people’ — the difference in the likelihood of a split dropped to 2 percent.”