What data says about marriage

Analysing available data, Austin Gatt concludes that marriageis still held as a significant institution and one society still prefers to retain.

Having hopefully cleared the field of arguments that would make us miss the woods for the trees, I revert again to central questions we need to answer: Is marriage in Malta in such dire straits divorce is the only way to go?

It is incredible that in all of this discussion, to date, I have seen very little data on Malta. That data is available from publications of the National Statistics Office while the law courts provide statistics that concern legal processes connected with separations, annulments and the recognition of foreign divorces. Comparative data of a demographic nature at a European level are available from Eurostat. These are the three sources I have used.

Before we start with the data relative to marriages, we need to understand there is a fundamental change happening to Malta’s resident population and this is important because it is increasingly reflected in the data for marriages. Malta’s resident population has gone up from 361,000 to 412,000 since 1990 but, at the same time, the percentage of foreigners (non-Maltese) has increased from two to four per cent, which, as we will see later on, is also having a profound effect on marriages in Malta.

Turning to marriages, it is absolutely not true these are on the way down. There is a tendency towards a drop in the ratio of marriages to population but the pure number of marriages is pretty steady and actually showing an inclination for more rather than fewer marriages.

Table 1 gives the average number of registered marriages for the years indicated.

As is more than evident from the graph (right) that maps the number of registered marriages for each year since 1990, the number of registered marriages has seen exceptional dips in 2001 to 2002, when there were even fewer marriages than in 2010. That exceptional low was eliminated in the 2002 to 2006 period following which the downward trend has again taken hold. In fact, the yo-yo effect is pretty evident and while the trend line shows an overall downward trend it is also evident that downward trend is not pronounced but gradual and – considering previous results – reversible.

What has been changing is the ratio of marriages per 1,000 of the registered population – the so-called marriage rate – which has steadily decreased practically year after year from 7.0 in 1990 to 5.7 in 2009. This is pretty much what is happening in all of Europe with marriage rates basically falling in all EU countries. At 5.7, we are still higher than most with only Cyprus, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland and Romania surpassing us.

However, a falling marriage rate is not an argument in favour of or against the family and while it may be sociologically interesting to examine why it is happening in Malta and elsewhere, it is neither here nor there in the present controversy.

The component of civil marriages within the total number of registered marriages is definitely on the rise. It was a mere six per cent in 1990 but stood at 32 per cent of all marriages in 2010! Further analysis shows that, basically, two-thirds of all spouses involved in civil marriages are not Maltese but one-third are Maltese citizens.

The highest recorded percentage of Maltese in civil marriages was in 1996 at 44 per cent.

The lowest recorded was in 2008 at 24 per cent. This data should be of interest to the Catholic Church because the number of marriages celebrated in church are obviously down substantially but from a lay point of view, and I hope we are agreed we are viewing all this from a lay perspective, it is neither here nor there.

I sincerely hope everyone considers civil marriages to be on the same footing as non-civil weddings and the consequences of breakdowns in one are similar to what happens in the other and that separation and divorces impact those affected both equally and in much the same manner!

I am not a sociologist and would not dare draw conclusions from this but there is another piece of data that is ignored, data I set out in table 2, once again extracted from the different NSO demographic reviews.

You do not need to analyse too much to arrive at the conclusion the simple fact that the number of non-Maltese residents has doubled over the last 20 years must have had a profound effect on Maltese society, including how we view and contract marriage.

I think it would be fair to say that the data points to a slow but steady decline in the marriage rate, in line with European experience but still leaving Malta at the high end of the marriage league in Europe while, possibly, unique in managing to maintain stable the number of marriages.

If I try to extrapolate that to a social conclusion I would say that marriage is still considered an important institution in Malta and one Maltese society would seem to still prefer holding to.

Table 1: Average number of marriages for years indicated

Average number of marriages in the last:

Table 2: Population spread

Tomorrow: Statistics and separations