6 January 2011

Since there's no help, come let us kiss & part...

My father prefers a funeral to a wedding. This isn't out of Scroogely soorness. He finds consignment rituals more sincere than the puff and forced jollity of nuptials, with their clutter of disconnected relatives and rather ghastly tendency to turn into an apotheosis of me.  If you share this leery attitude towards weddings, you can cheer up your early New Year with these Divorces and Dissolutions in Scotland 2009-2010 statistics, published just before Christmas, narrating the nation's ends of love.  As with the other official statistics I've plucked out here before, the very ubiquity of marriage and perceptions about divorce rates can bely their actual incidence.  To put the subsequent figures in context, early last year, statisticians confirmed that 27,524 weddings took place in Scotland in 2009, down from the 28,903 marital bonds which were forged in 2008. With the institution of same-sex civil partnerships, marriage statistics - formed and - are now supplemented by new information. So how many folk have availed themselves of the chance to form civil partnerships in Scotland? A little digging reveals that since the Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force in early December 2005, the official statistics are as follows:
  • 2005 ~ 84 partnerships (53 male & 31 female).
  • 2006 ~ 1,074 partnerships (580 male & 467 female).
  • 2007 ~ 688 partnerships (339 male & 349 female).
  • 2008 ~ 525 partnerships (245 male & 280 female).
  • 2009 ~ 498 partnerships (219 male & 279 female).
So how many of these marriages and partnerships unravelled last year? Best guesses, ladies and gentlemen? According to the bulletin, 10,173 divorces were granted in 2009/10. To contextualise the figures a little, this is 10% fewer than in 2008-09 and represents the lowest number of divorces to be granted the last decade.  27 civil partnerships were dissolved 2009-10, up from 17 in 2008-09. The first dissolutions of civil partnerships occurred in 2007-08, with two partnerships ending in that year. In total, since their inception in 2005, 46 same-sex civil partnerships have been dissolved.  Below you can see how the the number of Scottish divorces has changed across the last ten years:


The bulletin also contains these two interesting  graphs. The first records the age at which those who were divorces this year got married.


By contrast, here is the distribution of 2009/10's divorcees, by their age at divorce.


Historically, the General Register Office for Scotland has recorded the number of divorces granted by our Courts, having now accrued over 150 years worth of data. From a handful in 1855, it was not until 1878 that more than 50 divorces were granted. If we stick to our decimal prejudices, we see that the number of Scottish divorces hit three figures for the first time in 1888, four figures in 1942 and five in 1980. Interestingly, the highest ever number of divorces was recorded in 1985 with 13,365. Fascinating, how these demographics have shifted over time and how generations have echoed Michael Drayton's lines from The Parting:


Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part ~
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.


For those with a fierce interest in the topic and the marches and countermarches of marital concord through the years, here are the official divorce statistics for Scotland from 1855 to 2009, rendered as a graph of my own hasty construction, following the helpful suggestion of a diagrammatically minded reader. Those looking for the original figures published here can find them below or as a .pdf on the General Register Office for Scotland website.






Year Divorces
1855 11
1856 16
1857 18
1858 12
1859 24
1860 23
1861 27
1862 26
1863 9
1864 2
1865 4
1866 4
1867 5
1868 13
1869 7
1870 17
1871 11
1872 12
1873 25
1874 38
1875 33
1876 40
1877 29
1878 66
1879 55
1880 80
1881 71
1882 69
1883 65
1884 87
1885 76
1886 97
1887 80
1888 107
1889 100
1890 87
1891 107
1892 118
1893 112
1894 120
1895 117
1896 133
1897 142
1898 135
1899 176
1900 144
1901 158
1902 204
1903 194
1904 182
1905 167
1906 173
1907 200
1908 189
1909 192
1910 223
1911 234
1912 249
1913 250
1914 347
1915 242
1916 267
1917 297
1918 485
1919 829
1920 776
1921 500
1922 382
1923 363
1924 438
1925 451
1926 425
1927 474
1928 504
1929 519
1930 469
1931 569
1932 488
1933 510
1934 468
1935 498
1936 642
1937 649
1938 789
1939 890
1940 782
1941 764
1942 1,020
1943 1,317
1944 1,739
1945 2,227
1946 2,934
1947 2,533
1948 2,057
1949 2,447
1950 2,204
1951 1,955
1952 2,737
1953 2,376
1954 2,226
1955 2,078
1956 1,891
1957 1,747
1958 1,791
1959 1,704
1960 1,828
1961 1,830
1962 2,042
1963 2,245
1964 2,455
1965 2,691
1966 3,576
1967 3,038
1968 4,803
1969 4,246
1970 4,618
1971 4,812
1972 5,531
1973 7,135
1974 7,221
1975 8,319
1976 8,692
1977 8,823
1978 8,458
1979 8,837
1980 10,530
1981 9,895
1982 11,288
1983 13,238
1984 11,915
1985 13,365
1986 12,841
1987 12,123
1988 11,473
1989 11,634
1990 12,281
1991 12,400
1992 12,487
1993 13,292
1994 12,601
1995 12,292
1996 12,313
1997 12,241
1998 12,354
1999 11,872
2000 11,139
2001 10,651
2002 10,860
2003 10,864
2004 11,275
2005 10,913
2006 13,076
2007 12,813
2008 11,513
2009 10,371

2 comments :

  1. "Never met-or never parted. We would ne'er been broken hearted"

    Shit happens.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Quite so, Conan.

    Over the festive season, I've been re-reading George Orwell's essays on various topics. In his skeptical 1949 Reflections on Ghandi he takes up a similar theme, writing...

    "Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals."

    ReplyDelete