Marriages and divorces

A marriage is, in INS's definition, the freely consented union between a man and a woman, contracted under the conditions of the law. A divorce is the dissolution of a lawfully contracted marriage, by a final decision of a court, of a registrar or of a notary public; the data refer to the petitions on which the dissolution of the marriage was granted.

The two figures are not to be set against one another: the divorces of one year dissolve marriages contracted in different years, sometimes decades earlier. A ratio between them, of the “one divorce per four marriages” kind, says nothing about the risk that any particular marriage will break up — it merely compares two flows from the same calendar year.