They say that breaking up is hard to do, and that seems to be particularly true in many Western countries, where divorce rates have been steadily falling for the last few decades.

But why?

On today's episode, we look at some of the main reasons people decide to get divorced, or never get married at all.

We consider the effects on families, finances and emotional wellbeing, at a time that some people say is the most stressful in life.

With me today is Joanna Gosling, a long-time BBC journalist and presenter who now works as a mediator for couples considering divorce, and Marina Adshade, who is a professor at the Vancouver School of Economics, and regularly contributes to BBC programmes.

Lovely to have you both with us.

Thank you very much for having me.

It's great to be here.

Joanna, you sadly left us here at the BBC to pursue a career in mediation.

But why did you choose to work in what must at times be really acrimonious, really tense, that environment, working with couples who are divorcing?

Yes, it obviously can be high conflict, it is high conflict, it's dealing with people at the most difficult time of their lives often.

But I do it because I really care about supporting people through those difficult times and getting them as much as I can through to the other side, so that they can put it behind them and, you know, live their life, a new life, a changed life, but as they want it to be.

And Marina, you're at the Vancouver School of Economics.

Now what's that got to do with divorce?

Yeah, so I'm an unusual economist.

I work on the economics of sex and love.

I've been doing this, gosh, going back like 15 years when I decided to teach an economics course on sex and love for my students, just to get them interested in economics.

And it's kind of snowballed from there.

So the issues that we're going to be talking about today, I've been working on for a long time.

And it's, you know, it is absolutely an economic story, because we know that economics has a big role to play in why people both marry and divorce.

But also because economists have been working on this going back to the 1970s, you know, these issues of why people marry, why people divorce.

We're going to delve into a lot of these issues.

But I was surprised to hear that in Western countries, divorce rates are actually on the decline.

Why do you think that is, Marina?

Fewer people are getting married.

People are getting married when they're older.

People who marry when they're older are more likely to stay married.

So this is going to play a big role in it.

We've seen a big change in what I call marriage equality, where it used to be that people who were educated and had high incomes married at roughly the same rate as the people who had lower incomes and less education.

But that's really changed.

So now we're seeing mostly educated people getting married relative to people who are less education and those people tend to stay married.

Right.

So a lot of it has to do with the composition of who is marrying today.

That's the West.

But if you look at countries like India and China, we're seeing divorce rates go up.

I'm actually not surprised that divorce rates appear to be increasing in those countries because those countries that are a different stage of development than many of the countries in the West.

And we did see an increase in divorce rates, say, over the 20th century.

So you saw an increase in divorce rates and then a decline.

And you would expect in countries like India and China, you would have the same pattern.

There was an interesting thing they did in China where they introduced this cooling off period.

So the government enforced this.

Does that work when the government intervenes?

If nothing changes in the dynamic between two people being told that they've got to cool off and wait a bit longer, I don't think it's going to make them suddenly realize that they want to be together.

It might be an idea for states to invest in communication programs for these couples because that's invariably why relationships fall apart.

And so unless something shifts in that regard, as I say, being told that you've got to stay in it a bit longer for whatever reason isn't going to probably change anyone's mind.

Marina, what about India?

Because historically divorce is very low in India, but we are starting to see an increase.

So, you know, historically in India, many, many marriages were arranged marriages.

You know, if you go back to the 19, even to the 1990s, more than 90 percent of marriages were arranged marriages.

And arranged marriages do have a tendency to have a significantly lower divorce rate.

I mean, that might be because, you know, in an arranged marriage, people recognize that they have to work harder to, you know, to work on that communication and forming that they come from more traditional families where divorce isn't really an option.

So we've seen a decline in arranged marriages in India.

And at the same time, you start seeing an increase in divorce.

I don't actually see divorce as a bad thing or even an increase in divorce as a bad thing.

I mean, there was a lot of people in the West when divorce became easier in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There was a rush to divorce at that point because people were in deeply unhappy marriages and it gave them a chance to get out of those marriages.

There is research that's being done in the States that says that access to divorce has saved the lives of thousands of women.

And I'm guessing in India, it's exactly the same.

Women in South Asia often talk about the shame or the stigma that was attached to their ex-wife.

Reham Khan talked about the view of divorced women in Pakistan.

When a woman gets divorced, I think it's very easy for a community to then jump on the bandwagon and demonize her.

But the woman doesn't have to be a criminal to be going through a divorce or becoming a divorcee is almost like a license for anyone to just start maligning the woman.

Joanna, what would be your view on that?

That now, do you think there is still a sense of shame that people feel or a stigma around being divorced?

I think it would depend on different societies because there will be, obviously, as we've been hearing, different cultural pressures to, first of all, get married and stay married and then the societal pressures.

And even in countries where divorce is accepted and there sort of shouldn't be a shame or a stigma, I think that just anecdotally, people often do still feel that.

Marina, how much of a change is there, though, because people in the West particularly are getting married later?

People are looking for something different in marriage.

And, you know, I think personally, I think that love is way more important part of marriage now than it was in the past.

And so people marry later.

They wait until they find somebody that they're really compatible with.

They wait and find somebody who's going to be their best friend and is going to be a good parent and is going to fulfill all of those needs.

And because of that, people are more likely to stay married because they are choosing more carefully.

We've been talking about divorce rates falling in the West.

They're climbing in the Middle East.

Egypt's have more than doubled since the process was made easier for women in 2000.

And in a country like Kuwait, more than half of marriages are ending in divorce.

That's a rate that's higher than America's.

And Marina, I wanted to ask you about the pattern of divorce now, whether that's changing in these countries, are we actually seeing it's the women who are often initiating?

You know, I think this is largely always being true.

But certainly all the areas that we have data from, it's women are way more likely to initiate a divorce when women are more likely to initiate.

And then when they're surveyed later, they're more likely to say that they were glad they got divorced.

Men are much more likely to say they regret the divorce.

So it seems to be women's choices that are driving a lot of divorce.

Of course, this is universally true, but it's true for something like 70 percent of all divorces.

Well, let's dig a bit deeper into why people are getting divorced and what makes divorce more likely.

Marina, there must be this breaking point moment for many people.

What do you think of the issues that can lead up to that moment?

Personally, I think that one of the main reasons where people get divorced is that they have had a significant change in circumstances and they, you know, they might have had the ideal arrangement at the time that they got married.

But over the course of people's lives, things change.

And I think this is true for a lot of marriages because people's situation changes over their lives.

Maybe they want children and maybe they change their minds.

Maybe they want to live in one location and the other person doesn't want to live in that location.

And I think it's those things that are just very difficult to resolve where it no longer becomes the arrangement that people entered into originally.

You're nodding a lot.

Yeah.

And a lot of what I come across is people whose children are that bit older and they'll suddenly be like, we have just been focused on the children and focused on everything else and not focusing on each other.

And then there's that moment where it's just like, actually, what is there left between us?

And that's when the divorce will often hit.

What about the financial entanglement?

How problematic can that be during a divorce?

And how much is that also a reason that people choose to stay together?

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Often people do choose to stay together because it is extremely difficult to suddenly split the pot to sustain two households.

And then working out how you split up things when it's, you know, it's material assets often, but they have an enormous emotional pull.

Marina, I feel like I know about prenups from watching too much American TV growing up, but are they becoming more common?

I always tell my classes of students, if you get married, you should have a prenup.

And they really this really surprises them.

But, you know, we it's a big economic decision.

It's a big financial decision to get married.

And it makes sense to enter into a marriage, having some type of contract in place about what happens if that marriage is dissolved.

So they are becoming far more common.

There's also big variations around the world on to how assets are shared.

So, for example, a lot of places, the assets you bring into the marriage, you allowed to take out of the marriage.

Statistically, Marina, are there other factors that mean a couple is more likely to get divorced?

One of the big determinants of whether or not people divorce is whether or not there's a big age gap.

So once you get beyond six years, you have an increased risk of divorce.

Another thing that increases divorce is cross-cultural marriages have a tendency to have higher divorce rates, I think possibly because they don't get the same level of familial support.

Does the length of the marriage make a difference?

People in their 30s are less likely to get divorced than people in their 40s.

People in their 50s are actually more likely to get divorced.

And then after that, it starts to taper off.

So I think there is really a very strong children growing up phenomenon.

And if you've been married more than once, twice, three times, does that make I mean, does that make it more likely that you're going to divorce?

The probability of divorce, if it's your second marriage or your third marriage, is much higher.

And actually, it's also true that if people have not just been married, but have had like multiple cohabitating relationships.

How does divorce, it's a very general question, obviously, but how does it affect children?

Researching people who are now adults and the impact of their own parents' divorce on them, the damage is often caused where children don't get to make the choices.

Life is completely changing.

And if they're not heard in that and they don't feel that they've got autonomy, that's really where the damage can set in.

You might remember Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin talking about conscious uncoupling.

And the reason that they wanted to do it that way was so that they really could do the best for their children in terms of saying, OK, this is going to be different, but we're going to work together to make sure that it's as comfortable as it can be for you.

Joanna, you raised it before I could, conscious uncoupling.

Do people come to you and use that phrase?

Is it something that has taken off as an idea or has it been beneficial?

I am not sure how much of an idea, how much it has taken off as an idea, actually.

I think when they were getting divorced and they were talking about it, there was quite a lot of derision around it.

And, you know, we're talking about societal expectations, cultural expectations around marriage.

There are also those around divorce and what divorce looks like and how divorce is portrayed in the media and the high profile couples that we see having very difficult divorces.

It is an enormous shift to say, OK, let's have those good conversations.

Let's really put this family at the centre of everyone's care on this.

Do you think some of these high profile divorces kind of skew the conversation at times as well?

It's interesting because people have this perception that, you know, very wealthy people or celebrities or Hollywood stars are more likely to get divorced than everybody else.

But they're actually less likely to get divorced than everybody else.

What about the rise in divorce in some countries which have been a bit more oppressive in the past?

Has it been liberating for women?

It has been extremely good and it's been extremely good for women to be able to leave relationships where they're in abusive situations or oppressive situations or they just don't have the autonomy that we would expect women to have in our societies.

The numbers of women's lives that have been saved by the change to more accessible divorce is staggering.

Marina, if there are listeners out there who are considering a divorce, what would be your best piece of advice?

One of the things I've always really struggled with is the idea that a successful marriage is one that ends when somebody dies.

And I actually would love it if we could just move away from that and recognise that you can have successful marriages that end in divorce, right?

That you build lives together, you had families together, but then you reach a point where it was no longer working for both partners.

And I really wish we wouldn't call that a failed marriage.

And would you agree with that, changing the language, taking failure out of it?