Lesbian Divorce Rate: How Female, Male, and Opposite-Sex Couples Compare

Is it true lesbians have the highest divorce rate?

Yes in Sweden's and Norway's marriage registers, where female couples divorce at the highest rate; in England and Wales, female civil partners dissolve partnerships at a higher rate than male civil partners. In the register rates that compare them directly (England and Wales 2023, Sweden through 2012), that works out to about 1.5 to 2 times the comparison groups' rate.

The claim usually reaches people online as "three times higher," with no year attached. Swedish registers for 1995 to 2012 found female same-sex marriages ending in divorce at more than three times the opposite-sex rate around 2000, easing to nearly twice the rate of other unions by 2012. Who got counted? Swedish-born adults in the national registers, including 4,230 women and 2,444 men who entered a same-sex marriage before age 50, followed by demographers Martin Kolk and Gunnar Andersson.

Over the same years, the men's divorce risk moved close to that of opposite-sex couples, so the three-times figure describes Swedish women for a few years around 2000. It's worth noticing, too, that a pattern across thousands of marriages says nothing certain about any one couple, including your own.

How four countries compare female, male, and opposite-sex couples

Each country counted something different, so the table groups its rows by the kind of number. Yearly rates come first, then relative risks, then cumulative percentages, meaning the share of couples who had split after a set time, and last the shares of all same-sex divorces.

The 1.5 to 2 times range above comes from civil partnerships in England and Wales, about 1.5 times by our arithmetic, and from Sweden's marriages. Marriage counts in England and Wales show a much smaller gap: female couples' share of same-sex divorces sits close to their share of weddings, as the section on gay men below shows. Norway's statisticians found female couples more divorce-prone than male couples, with no narrowing of the gap through 2011.

The England and Wales opposite-sex figure in the table counts marriages, a different kind of union from civil partnerships, so it sits there for scale only. The U.S. rows come from research studies, and none gives a divorce rate for married female couples.

What is the lesbian divorce rate in the U.S.?

No U.S. agency publishes one. CDC's National Center for Health Statistics suspended detailed divorce data in January 1996, so it now reports only total divorces and a rate per 1,000 residents, 2.4 in 2023 across 45 reporting states and D.C., with no split by the sex of the spouses.

A Williams Institute report published in December 2014 used divorce counts collected early that year from two states, New Hampshire and Vermont. By then 5.4% of New Hampshire's same-sex couples and 3.6% of Vermont's had divorced in roughly the first four years of marriage equality, an average of 1.1% a year, against about 2% a year for married different-sex couples. In a broader set of states, 1.6% of same-sex couples ended civil unions, domestic partnerships, or marriages each year.

The report does not split women from men, and many of those marriages were only a few years old when counted. For how many same-sex married couples live in the U.S. today, see same-sex couple household statistics.

How much more likely are lesbian couples to divorce than gay men?

In England and Wales, about one and a half times as likely, by our arithmetic on the 2023 civil partnership figures: 11.2 dissolutions per 1,000 civil-partnered women against 7.4 per 1,000 civil-partnered men. Each figure divides by the people who could have dissolved a partnership, so it works as a rate.

ONS also publishes same-sex divorce rates for marriages, but they divide by everyone who is married, and ONS says not to compare them with opposite-sex rates.

The figure quoted more often is a share. In 2023, female couples received 1,217 of the 1,891 same-sex divorces in England and Wales, 64.4%, or 1.81 female couples for every male couple. A share only means something beside the share of weddings: female couples made up 62.8% of the 7,800 same-sex marriages in 2022.

Set 2022's same-sex weddings beside that year's divorces: there were 1.69 female couples for every male couple marrying (4,896 against 2,904) and 1.65 for every male couple divorcing, since female couples received 808 of 1,298 divorces, or 62.2%. By our arithmetic on the published counts, the divorce share barely differs from the wedding share.

The couples divorcing in 2022 and 2023 married in earlier years, so hold the comparison loosely: if those weddings included a smaller share of women, female couples' divorce risk would be higher than the side-by-side suggests.

Do lesbian couples have the highest separation rate?

In U.S. data on young adults, only when the count starts at move-in. In the Add Health survey, relationships between two men ended most often when counted from the start of the relationship, and female couples looked least stable only once the count was limited to the years a couple lived together.

Sociologists Kara Joyner, Wendy Manning and Ryan Bogle followed young adults who were ages 24 to 32 at the survey's fourth wave, measuring each relationship from when the partners became romantically or sexually involved. In the authors' working-paper version, 38% of male couples, 22% of female couples, and 19% of different-sex couples had broken up by that wave. Female couples also had a higher raw rate than different-sex couples, but once the authors accounted for other ways the couples differed, those differences explained the gap.

Counted only over the years a couple shared a home, the order changes. About 20% of both male and female couples dissolved a shared home, against 12% of different-sex couples, and in the models female couples had the highest rate of ending one. Women with female partners had moved in more often than men with male partners, 65% against 48%, and the authors write that the higher female rate is partly a product of starting the count at move-in.

A second study, by Manning, Susan Brown and J. Bart Stykes, followed 5,701 couples in the Census Bureau's 2008 survey panel. Same-sex cohabiting couples were about as stable as different-sex cohabiting couples, both were less stable than different-sex married couples, and couples of either kind in states with constitutional marriage bans were less stable. The answer to "highest" depends on whether you count marriages, shared homes, or whole relationships.

Why do lesbian couples divorce more often?

No study has measured the cause directly, and the researchers who come closest offer possibilities with careful hedges. Kolk and Andersson cite earlier research finding that women are more likely than men to initiate divorce, in same-sex unions and in opposite-sex marriages, and suggesting that gendered patterns of socialization may matter more for couples than minority status.

In their own discussion, Kolk and Andersson add that women may be more sensitive than men to aspects of relationship quality. Adding controls for age and education left the Swedish pattern much the same. They also note that reliable data on childbearing and parenthood in same-sex unions are still scarce.

Joyner and her coauthors add possibilities of their own: female couples may watch their relationships more closely, and they may feel more stress when a partner hides the relationship or family members reject it. The authors offer these with a "may" attached, and the survey did not measure them.

England and Wales also record who applied, for divorces granted under the no-fault law that took effect in April 2022. Among those new-law divorces granted in 2022, 60.9% of female same-sex divorces were applied for by one partner alone, compared with 46.8% for male couples and 71.7% for opposite-sex couples. Those records carry no reasons, so they cannot explain the gap.

How to read a lesbian divorce statistic

When a figure like "three times higher" goes around, a few questions sort it out quickly. Which country and years did it count? Is it a yearly rate, a share of all same-sex divorces, or a cumulative percentage over some number of years? Did it count marriages, civil partnerships, shared homes, or whole relationships?

Then ask how long the marriages had time to last. Same-sex marriage began in England and Wales in 2014, so no same-sex marriage divorcing there in 2023 could have run a full ten years. That year the middle duration at divorce was 6.3 years for female couples and 7.2 for male couples, against 12.7 years for opposite-sex couples.

Put the viral figures through those questions and most of them shrink to something smaller and more specific. We found no primary source for "three times higher" beyond Sweden's rates for a few years around 2000, and we could not match the 30% to 41% ten-year range that circulates online to any study. The 72% that also circulates matches England and Wales in 2019, when female couples received 589 of 822 same-sex divorces (71.7%, our arithmetic), and like any share it cannot tell you a divorce rate until you set it beside the share of weddings.

What to check next about divorce numbers

For a woman dating women, these figures describe crowds in mostly other countries and years. Read them as a picture of the crowd, not a forecast for your own relationship.

The same rate-or-share question works on the U.S. divorce figures you'll meet next. The 2.4 divorce rate counts divorces per 1,000 residents in one year, and it cannot tell you how many marriages end; for how long U.S. marriages last before a divorce, see average length of marriage.

If you're sizing your own pool, the women's standards calculator counts women by state and age, with divorced and separated women inside its not-married filter; multiply that count by the lesbian and bisexual shares of women. Dating apps for lesbians compares where to meet.