A. Married women are outnumbered by singletons for the first time, official figures show.
B. There are more single, divorced and widowed women than wives in England and Wales according to the Office for National Statistics.
C. The figures in the latest edition of Population Trends show that unmarried women became the majority in 2004.
D. Between 1996 and 2004 the number of divorced and single women rose by 1.5 million. Fewer than 11 million are now married.
Marriage has become particularly unfashionable for women in their 20s. Perhaps mindful of the divorce statistics, couples are waiting longer than ever before making a commitment to marriage.
In the early 1970s, 85 percent of women were married before their 30th birthday. Now fewer than one in three women in her late 20s is married. The ONS figures showed than in 2003 there were 11 million wives compared with 10,892,000 single, divorced or widowed women.
In 2004, married women fell to 10,935,000 while single, divorced or widowed women rose to 11,090,000. Marriage projections have great implications for government policy, as well as significant sociological effects. For example, if current trends continue, there will be far fewer hefty divorce settlements in favour of women.
The number of cohabiting couples is projected to rise from two million to 3.8 million in 2031 and they will also be older on average.
The number of people living together at the age of 45 to 64 is projected to rise to 1.25 million men in 2031, compared with 375,000 in 2003, and from 317,000 to more than 1.1 million women.
Jill Kirby, of the Centre for Policy Studies, said: ‘The serious decline of marriage is a very worrying development. Cohabitation is an inherently fragile partnership.
It is not divorce that will have a serious impact on children in the future but parents moving in and out of different relationships in which marriage is not a factor. A lot of women in their forties and fifties will be living alone, perhaps having had a relationship or two but never having been married, with all sorts of emotional and financial implications.’
The trend away from marriage is similar to the US where married couples whose numbers have horn declining for decades as a proportion of American households - finally slipped into a minority, according to a recent analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.
The American Community Survey, by the Census Bureau, found dial 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation's 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples with and without children - down from more than 52 per cent five years earlier.
Experts said the decision not to marry was partially fuelled by women in the work force who do not necessarily have to marry to be economically secure.
Andrew Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College of the City University of New York, said: ‘You used to get married to have sex. Now one of the major reasons to get married is to have children, and the attractiveness of having children has declined for many people because of the cost.'
The Fawcett Society, which campaigns for equality of the sexes, said: ‘In some respects, home and family life is very different for women now compared to the 1970s.
The percentage of married women has dropped from 74 percent in 1979 to 49 per cent. The average number of children per household has gone down from two in 1971 to 1.8 in 2001. Instead, many mote couples cohabit.
But it is striking how little has changed at home for many women. While we have had a revolution in the large numbers of women going out to work, men still are not sharing the unpaid work in the home.
We now need a revolution in men’s lives too. This would be of benefit not only to women with male partners, but to all women and men who want a better work life balance.’