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March 10, 2026 — 5:00am
For years we’ve been hearing that marriage rates are falling and that anyone born late last century considers it optional. But that could be changing.
A London Times study found that Gen Z are more in favour of marriage than young adults were 20 years ago, with almost two-thirds of them believing that marriage is still an important institution. Meanwhile, in Australia the divorce rate is the lowest it’s been in 50 years, and marriages are lasting longer.
Culturally, it seems marriage is undergoing a huge rebrand.
In the music world a lot of the so-called pop girlies are entering their wife era: Charli XCX and Lana Del Rey got married in the past couple of years, while Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa got engaged.
Swift’s Instagram post about her engagement to American football player Travis Kelce was liked 37 million times and shared more than a million times within six hours of her posting it. On The Graham Norton Show, Swift said she plans to “invite anyone I’ve ever talked to” to her wedding, which will be a lavish endorsement of the concept of marriage – the likes of which we haven’t seen since Meghan walked down the aisle towards Harry.
One of the biggest shows of 2025, The Summer I Turned Pretty, was about a 21-year-old woman getting married. (“Isn’t that unrealistic? Why doesn’t she just go on a gap year?” I’d ask my nearly-40-year-old friends, who’d shush me so they could concentrate on the show.)
In A Court of Thorns and Roses, an astonishingly popular romantasy series by Sarah J. Maas – she’s sold 75 million copies in 40 languages – even an immortal character decides to get hitched at age 22, despite having literal eternity to get around to it.
The 10th season of Love Is Blind has just finished airing on Netflix and it is not so much a reality TV show as a harrowing documentary about the dangers of being obsessed with getting married.
As someone who finds the institution of marriage fundamentally unromantic I am baffled by its continued popularity. My idea of romance is getting up every day and choosing to stay with someone – without a legally binding contract that enforces it.
I’ve been in a relationship for nearly a decade and we are yet to find a single compelling reason to get married.
As a de facto couple living together in Australia we have many of the same rights as married couples, without the crushing pressure of an expensive event and paperwork I’ve seen dramatically change people’s behaviour (and not for the better).
When trying to understand this renewed enthusiasm for getting hitched, I’m at a loss.
Perhaps there is a sense of joyful nihilism to it. With the state of the world as it is, maybe the idea of putting on a huge white dress in front of the people you love is more appealing than ever. A distraction, an act of hope.
“People are not delusional but we still have a soft spot for fairy-tale outcomes and that sentiment of living happily ever after,” says Dr Lixia Qu, senior research fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. “Although marriage has declined, the desire for it has not disappeared. Most people still see marriage as important and relevant.”
Not me. No, thank you.
Like marriage, divorce – despite being acknowledged as one of life’s most stressful events, somewhere between the death of a partner and moving house – has been getting its own chic cultural rebrand. Reformation’s new “divorcee” collection stars a high-profile California divorce lawyer and we all saw the memes about Nicole Kidman “winning” her divorce from Keith Urban by unleashing her natural curls, hitting the runway for Vogue and asking Ariana Grande out for dinner.
Even though I like the divorcee aesthetic – leopard print, big coat, high heels – I’d really rather avoid it.
A dear friend whose marriage didn’t survive its first year said to me once: the only way to ensure you’ll never get divorced is to never get married. Until further notice, that is my plan.
It’s nice to have a party, it’s gorgeous to celebrate love – particularly queer love, at weddings that are not haunted by the grisly track record of gender dynamics and misogyny – and it’s essential that we get joy wherever we can.
But the act of a woman marrying a man is still so unavoidably patriarchal that I can’t help finding it deeply unromantic.
That’s me, that’s my decision, for my life, which I lead. Anyone who wants to get married, I wish you such happiness.
But I’ll say this: the Charli XCX divorce album is going to be amazing.
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