Rise in middle-aged spinsters as women are scarred by parents’ split

BRITAIN is seeing a return of middleaged bachelors and spinsters, as the number of single people in their 50s has doubled in 15 years. Analysis of ONS figures for The Sunday Telegraph shows that the number of people in their fifties who have never been married or in a civil partnership, and who do not cohabit, has almost doubled since 2002, from 377,180 to 724,439.

The shift is particularly striking among women.

The number in their early fifties who have never married has increased by 150 per cent in 13 years, from 74,941 in 2002 to 185,694 in 2015.

Among men the number increased from 135,216 to 228,078, a 70 per cent rise. Experts suggest that commitmentphobic “silver singles” may have been influenced by divorce liberalisation.

The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 allowed couples to divorce without having to prove fault and the divorce rate increased from 5.9 divorces per 1,000 couples in 1971 to a peak of 14.2 splits per 1,000 couples in 1994.

The figures suggest that children of the first wave of “seventies splitters” may be experiencing the long-term effects of their parents’ divorces.

Professor Ann Buchanan, of Oxford University, who researches the effects of divorce on children, said: “Divorce wasn’t so acceptable then so they would have been in their 20s and 30s and finding themselves a bit outside the norm.

“Bad experiences with divorce would certainly mean they were less likely to commit themselves.” Debora Price, a professor of social gerontology at Manchester University, said these divorces “almost certainly had an effect”.

She said: “For the first time, lots of children were growing up in households where their parents had divorced.

“There is some suggestion that those children then did not see marriage as something they wanted to achieve.”