Want to stay wed? Be careful where you live

... and whatever you do, don’t settle at the seaside

THEY say there is no magic formula that makes marriage work.

But for those who tie the knot and want to remain wed, a new report reveals that three Scots areas are among the top ten in the UK for happy marriages.

The areas with the lowest divorce rates in Scotland are East Dunbartonshire at 5.94 per cent, East Renfrewshire at 6.19 per cent and the Western Isles at 6.5 per cent.

In the rest of the UK, Harrow in Middlesex is in the top spot at 5.41 per cent, followed by Tower Hamlets in London at 5.65 per cent.

Meanwhile, the top ten places in the UK with the highest divorce rates are all beside the sea.

The list is headed by Blackpool, Lancashire, where there is a 13.13 per cent chance of marriage failure, with Hastings, Sussex, a close second, while Torbay in Devon has a divorce rate of 12.19 per cent.

Experts said these figures could be due to the quietness of coastal living.

And despite the idyllic image of living by the sea, the reality is that many of our traditional seaside towns are struggling.

Lyn Ayrton, managing partner at Lake Legal, which carried out the research, said: ‘While seaside towns can be lovely places to live, they are often areas of high deprivation.

‘Often money problems rather than infidelity lead to behaviour that is then cited as the reason for divorce. It is difficult to explain why seaside towns have a much higher divorce rate than inland towns.

‘Perhaps, after lively summer seasons at the seaside, the sheer boredom of winter on the coast in England drove inhabitants to some form of distraction?’

Dr Andy Peloe, technical consult- ant at Callcredit, helped to collate the data, which was based on the last census.

The divorce rate in the UK as a whole was 8.2 per cent last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.

The long-term increase in the number of divorces is being driven by a greater rise in divorce among those aged 50 to 64 than in younger age groups.

Figures from 2013 saw the number of Scots who got married fall to a 40-year low, while a survey of social attitudes in the same year found that nearly seven out of ten Scots believed marriage to be a redundant institution.

Figures for 2014 show marriage levels are still historically low, although they rose by 1,500 on the year before.

Of a total of 29,070 registered marriages, 367 involved same-sex couples after Holyrood introduced a new law on December 16.

From that date, couples in a civil partnership could exchange their union for a marriage certificate but new same- sex marriages were only allowed from the last day of 2014.