For decades, divorce was treated as a sign that something had gone wrong: A marriage had failed, a family had fractured and a promise had been broken.

But Australia’s latest divorce figures suggest a more complicated story.

The number of divorces granted in Australia rose in 2025, but the longer-term trend remains downward. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 49,158 divorces were granted last year, up 4.1 per cent from 47,216 in 2024. Yet the crude divorce rate was just 2.2 divorces per 1000 people aged 16 and over, well below the 3.3 recorded in 2005.

At first glance, that looks reassuring: Fewer Australians are divorcing than 20 years ago. But there is another story hidden inside the numbers. Australians are marrying less frequently, marrying later and, when marriages do end, increasingly reaching that point in middle age and beyond.

In 2025, there were 118,804 marriages in Australia, 1.7 per cent fewer than the previous year. The marriage rate fell from 5.5 to 5.3 marriages per 1000 people aged 16 and over. Meanwhile, the median age at marriage was 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women.

So the falling divorce rate cannot simply be interpreted as Australians becoming better at staying married. There are fewer marriages in the first place, and that inevitably reduces the pool of people who can eventually divorce.

More revealing is who is getting divorced.

The median age at divorce rose in 2025 to 47.3 for men and 44.4 for women. Divorce rates increased among men aged 40-44 and older and among women aged 35-39 and older, while rates among younger adults fell slightly. The median duration of marriage before separation also increased, reaching 9.4 years.

This is the statistical backdrop to the phenomenon often called “grey divorce”: Relationships ending after 50, sometimes after decades together.

And these divorces can mean something quite different from the breakdown of a marriage in the 20s or early 30s.

For couples in their 40s and 50s, the pressures can be intense. Children may be teenagers or leaving home. Careers are often at their most demanding. Mortgages remain substantial. At the same time, ageing parents may begin to require care. It is the period demographer Simon Kuestenmacher has described as a point when competing demands on time, money and emotional energy can reach their maximum.

It is also a period when people can begin asking a difficult question: If the children have grown, the mortgage is manageable and retirement is approaching, what do I actually want the rest of my life to look like?

That question may be contributing to a cultural shift in how Australians think about partnership.

My research into later-life dating suggests that many people, particularly women, are no longer necessarily seeking the traditional package of romance: Shared home, merged finances, constant companionship and an assumption that one partner will eventually become the other’s carer. For a woman who has spent decades doing unpaid caring work, interrupted paid employment or carrying much of the domestic load, starting another relationship does not necessarily mean wanting to start another household.
There can be enormous appeal in companionship without complete financial and domestic merger.

That is particularly significant because men and women can arrive at later-life relationships with very different financial circumstances. Years spent caring for children or family can translate into lower lifetime earnings, lower superannuation and fewer accumulated assets. For someone who has finally achieved a degree of financial independence, combining finances and property with a new partner may feel less like a romantic gesture than a serious financial decision.

There is another factor that should not be overlooked: Housing.
Australia’s extraordinarily expensive property market may actually be keeping some unhappy couples together. Separating one household into two is expensive. Selling a home, dividing assets and finding somewhere else to live can be financially impossible for some couples. That creates an important distinction between the divorce rate and the relationship health of the population.

A lower divorce rate does not necessarily mean fewer unhappy marriages. Some couples may remain together because they want to; others because they cannot afford not to. Some participants in my research indicated they had an open conversation to this effect with their partner.

There is therefore no single “Australian divorce story”.

The statistics tell us that divorce is lower than it was two decades ago. They also tell us that marriage itself is becoming less common, and they show that when relationships do end, the people involved are increasingly older.

Behind those statistics is a broader cultural change.

Love is no longer necessarily something Australians expect to secure in their 20s, formalise in their 30s and preserve unchanged for the next 40 years. People are living longer, women have greater economic independence than previous generations, social expectations around marriage have loosened, and the idea that being single is evidence of personal failure has weakened.

The old ideal was completion: Find someone, build a household and stay together. The emerging ideal may be different: Find someone who fits the life you have actually built and don’t assume that intimacy requires giving up independence.

Dr Lisa Portolan is a casual academic at the University of Technology Sydney. Her PhD on dating apps and intimacy from Western Sydney University was published in 2024. It has also been released as a book: Love, intimacy and online dating (Routledge, 2023)