Are humanist marriages really less likely to end in divorce?

By John Paul Fitzpatrick — Humanist Society Scotland celebrant

Every so often this statistic does the rounds again, usually shared by a couple who've just booked me and want to tell their granny something reassuring: humanist marriages in Scotland apparently end up in the divorce courts less often than other kinds of marriage. It was BBC Scotland that first reported it properly, pulling together court and registration figures and finding that couples married by humanist celebrants had one of the lowest rates of divorce action of any marriage type in the country. I get asked about it a lot, so I think it deserves a proper answer rather than a smug one-liner on a wedding brochure.

Here's my honest answer: I believe the finding is real, I think there's a plausible explanation for it, and I also think you should be suspicious of anyone — me included — who tells you a humanist ceremony will make your marriage last. Let me walk through why.

What was actually reported

The BBC Scotland story looked at the proportion of marriages of each type — religious, civil, humanist — that later show up in Scotland's divorce statistics. Humanist marriages came out notably low. Not a rounding error, not a fluke of small numbers, but a consistent enough gap that it was worth a news story. I'm not going to invent a precise percentage here, because I don't have the underlying dataset in front of me and I'd rather understate this than overclaim it. What I can say is that the pattern has held up well enough, over enough years, that it isn't something a humanist celebrant made up to sell weddings.

So the stat is real. The interesting question — the one worth actually thinking about rather than just repeating — is why.

The tempting explanation, and why I'm wary of it

The easy story is: humanist ceremonies are more meaningful, meaningful ceremonies produce stronger marriages, therefore book a humanist celebrant and your marriage is safer. I'd love that to be true. I don't think it's honest.

This is a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation, and it's worth being plain about that rather than burying it in a footnote. People who choose a humanist ceremony are not a random sample of everyone getting married in Scotland. They are, by definition, a group of people who actively opted out of the default — who decided a fixed script, inherited from a religious tradition they may not follow or a civil register office they found a bit flat, wasn't going to say what they wanted said. That's already a selection effect before either of us has written a word of the ceremony.

People who take that step tend, in my experience, to already be somewhat reflective about what marriage means to them. They're more likely to have talked — really talked, not just logistics — about why they want to get married, what they expect from each other, what they're scared of. Those are exactly the kinds of couples who show up less often in divorce statistics regardless of who conducts their wedding. So some, maybe most, of that lower rate could simply be describing the kind of couple who chooses humanist marriage, not anything the ceremony itself does to them.

What I think the ceremony genuinely adds, though

That said, I don't think the process is neutral either, and I'd be underselling my own job if I pretended it was. Here's the part I've watched happen, over and over, sitting across the table from couples in my Glasgow flat or over video calls at all hours: writing a humanist ceremony from scratch forces a conversation most couples never have out loud, together, in full sentences.

There's no script to recite. No "wilt thou" to fall back on. Instead I ask you both, quite directly, what your relationship actually means to you — how you met, what you argue about, what you've forgiven each other for, what you're promising and why. You have to write your own vows and say them out loud in front of everyone who matters to you, which means you first have to work out, together, what's actually true. Couples tell me this process is sometimes harder than the wedding day itself — and I believe them, because I've watched the pauses, the "actually, wait, is that right?" moments, the bits where one of you says something the other didn't quite expect. That's not scriptwriting. That's a fairly serious act of relationship reflection, several months before you stand up and promise something in public.

I don't think that guarantees anything. But I do think a couple who has sat with those questions, articulated their own answers, and said them out loud together has done something different from a couple who turned up and repeated words written by someone else four hundred years ago. Whether that difference shows up thirty years later in a divorce court, I genuinely don't know. Nobody does. It's a reasonable hypothesis, not a proven mechanism.

So what should you actually take from this?

Not a guarantee. If you're choosing a humanist ceremony hoping it's an insurance policy against divorce, I'd gently push back — that's not what this is, and I'd be lying to you if I let you believe it. What I think you can take from it is something quieter: that the process of building your own ceremony, rather than borrowing one, tends to attract couples who already think hard about what they're doing, and tends to make them think harder still along the way. Whether that's the ceremony causing something or simply revealing something that was already there, I honestly can't separate out from the outside.

What I can tell you is what actually happens if you work with me: we'll spend real time on what a humanist wedding day actually looks like, and more importantly, real time before that on who you are as a couple. You can read what other couples have said about that process on my testimonials page — several mention the writing process itself more than the day. That, for me, is the honest version of the statistic: not proof of anything, but a decent argument for taking the conversation seriously rather than skipping straight to the flowers.