Number of marriages and divorces dropped in Norway
Photo Unsplash, Kelly Sikkema
Northern Europe
The number of divorces and separations in Norway has not been so low in 40 years. Last year, 18,000 spouses went separate ways, new figures from Statistics Norway show. The number of marriages, however, has also declined.
Lockdowns due to the pandemic did not cause a spike in divorces. Last year, 9,100 divorces were entered into in Norway. That is 1,000 fewer than in 2020 and the lowest since 1980. This reports the Norwegian statistic bureau.
In recent years, it has steadily become less common to divorce, especially among those over 35 years. Last year, the main reason for the decline was that there were fewer people in the age group 40-49 who divorced than in 2020, says Karstein Sørlien in the Christian Norwegian daily Dagen.
From 1996 to 2017, the annual number of marriages remained between 22,000 and 24,000. However, this number has decreased significantly ever since. In 2020, the first year of the Covid pandemic, there were 16,200 marriages. Last year, this number went down to 16,100. Sørlien says that the pandemic and an everyday life with infection control measures probably contributed to fewer people choosing to get married last year than before.
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