Fact check: Are de facto relationships more unstable than marriages?

Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews claims de facto relationships are less stable than marriages.

"The data shows there is a higher incidence of de facto relationships breaking up," Mr Andrews told News Corp Australia.

Mr Andrews is currently overseeing the trial of a program that gives counselling vouchers to married and de facto couples, in an attempt to help curb separation rates.

ABC Fact Check takes a look at the success and failure of marriage and de facto partnerships.

Marriage and divorce

The Australian Bureau of Statistics collates data on marriage and divorce every calendar year, drawing on information provided by courts and registry offices. The most recent available data is from 2012.

In 2012 there were 123,244 marriages registered across all states and territories. In the same year, there were 49,917 divorces granted. So in 2012, more than twice as many people married as divorced.

A 2007 ABS analysis concluded that 33 per cent of all marriages entered into between 2000 and 2002 would end in divorce. It found that the number of marriages that ended in divorce had increased since the 1980s, with 28 per cent of marriages that occurred between 1985 and 1987 expected to end in divorce.

The 2012 statistics also show that 77.6 per cent of married couples lived together before marriage.

But this data does not allow a comparison of the stability of marriage over de facto relationships, which the ABS does not track.

The census

The national census conducted by the ABS every five years asks about the relationship between people living in the same household.

Lixia Qu, a senior research fellow from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, tells Fact Check a comparison of the census results for 2006 and 2011 showed that "20 per cent of cohabiting adults in 2006 were single five years later in 2011, compared to seven per cent of married adults in 2006, who were single five years later".

"The census data reflected social marital status at the two time points and didn't capture any change such as re-partnering between 2006 and 2011," Dr Qu said. "Persons who were recorded as in a de facto relationship or married may not be with the same partner."

De facto or marriage?

Information more helpful to assessing Mr Andrews's claim can be found in the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which began in 2001 and is run by the University of Melbourne and funded by the Federal Government.

The most recent HILDA survey, published in 2012, found that 51.8 per cent of Australians over 15 were married and 10.4 per cent were living in a de facto relationship.

Australian law allows marriages where both parties are at least 18 years old, or where one party is aged between 16 and 18 if approved by a court.

While the report didn't directly compare the dissolution of marriages and de facto relationships, it did say this about changes in marital status between 2004 and 2009: "The most volatile groups seem to be separated people and those in de facto relationships. However, most of the separated people who had changed marital status after 2004 had proceeded with a divorce, and a large proportion (66.9 per cent) of the 50.2 per cent of de factos who changed status after 2004 got married, 67.2 per cent of them marrying the person they were living with in 2004," the report says.

"Furthermore, among those who were in de facto relationships in both 2004 and 2009, 65.1 per cent were still living with the same partner."

So while the de facto couples experienced more change in their relationships, not all of that change was because the relationship ended. Well over half of the changes to de facto relationships were because those people got married - and the majority of those marrying were marrying their previously recorded de facto partner, not someone new.

Interpreting the data

Belinda Hewitt, a senior researcher at the University of Queensland's Institute for Social Science Research, tells Fact Check that Mr Andrews was probably right about the stability of de facto relationships.

"Overall, cohabiting relationships are more likely to split up, but there are many types of cohabiting relationships and those that proceed to marriage are no more likely to break up than those who marry [without living together first]," Dr Hewitt said.

She said that the detailed HILDA data showed that if de facto couples didn't get married, they were six times more likely to split up than people who married after cohabiting. They were 7.8 times more likely to split up than people who married without cohabiting, she said.

"Over the 15 years in HILDA only 19.3 per cent of people married without cohabiting. Of those who formed a cohabiting relationship between 1995 and 2010, 63.8 per cent married, 11.07 per cent split up and the rest were still cohabiting at the end of the observation time - 25.2 per cent," she said.

"Of those who were married 1.42 per cent split up... and 1.80 per cent of those who married after cohabitation split up."

The early years

With colleague Professor Janeen Baxter, Dr Hewitt has produced an analysis of relationship breakdown in a chapter for a recent book, Family Formation in 21st Century Australia.

Using HILDA data, they looked at relationships formed since 1995, and found that many couples are using cohabitation to determine whether to get married or not.

"It appears that many of the marriages that might once have ended in the first few years of marriage may have been replaced by cohabiting relationships. This has resulted in a lower risk of divorce early in marriage for more recent marriage cohorts than in previous marriage cohorts.

"As in previous generations, Australians continue to form relationships that are relatively unstable in their early years, but in more recent generations those relationships are less likely to be legalised with marriage," their research found.

Minimising risk

Dr Hewitt said she thought that for many people cohabitation is a selection process before getting married.

"The evidence does suggest that overall cohabitors are more likely to split up, but I think that's because many cohabitations are for convenience or are trial marriages where the relationship doesn't work out."

A 2009 study by Dr Qu and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Ruth Weston and David de Vaus, found that couples moving from cohabitation to marriage "believe that they have minimised the risks of entering a marriage that is likely to break down".

The study, based on data collected through HILDA and published in the Journal of Comparative Family Studies, said: "Despite its increasing prevalence, cohabitation is a relatively unstable living arrangement as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of couples either marry or separate within the first few years of the union. Indeed, the probability of cohabitation ending in separation rather than marriage has increased."

The verdict

The data shows that de facto relationships are more volatile than marriages. But for the majority of couples, a de facto relationship is the pathway to marriage.

Still, for those who never marry, the chance of separating is more than sixtimes higher. Mr Andrews's claim that there is "a higher incidence of de facto relationships breaking up" checks out.

Sources

• ABS Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2012

• ABS Australian Social Trends, 2007, Lifetime marriage and divorce trends

• HILDA survey, Families, Incomes and Jobs, Volume 7

• Cohabitation and beyond, The Journal of Comparative Family Studies, July 2009

• Relationship Dissolution, Belinda Hewitt and Janeen Baxter, in Family Formation in the 21st Century, 2014