Divorce: What you didn't realise

15:10 15 December 2010

It seems that 2010 was the year of the break up. We had Cheryl and Ashley Cole, Courtney Cox and David Arquette and even Dawn French and Lenny Henry.

So, as yet another Hollywood couple announce that their marriage is over, we're looking at you Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds, we bring you five things you never knew about the 'D' word.

Costly

The average divorce costs around $50,000 - which works out at just over £30,000.

One site, divorce360.com, used statistics from the US Census Bureau to reveal that the average figure is about $53,000.

Every divorce is different of course, but this figure takes into account marriage therapy for before and after the divorce, moving costs, the costs of selling the family home, lawyer and financial advisor fees, the cost of getting a new mortgage for one of the partners and the cost of renting a flat for the other.

Decline

The overall divorce rate has been slowly falling everywhere, apart from in one place; Utah. 

Utah is the only state in the US that the number of divorces hasn't fallen.

Politically minded

Divorce goes hand in hand with radical politics, according to one historian, Roderick Phillips. It had a role in the overthrowing and killing of historical figures such as Louis XVI, George III and Tsar Nicholas II.

He cites in Putting Asunder, an account of western divorce, Vladimir Lenin's relaxed divorce laws in the wake of the Russian Revolution and history's first no-fault divorce laws in 1792 following the French Revolution.

Highest divorce rate?

Born-again Christians have the highest divorce rate according to a study by Barna Research Group. This result was met with a lot of criticism, not surprisingly, with many Christians discounting it.

Reasons

And who'd to blame for making divorce possible in the first place? Before Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation, the west's attitude towards marriage was a wholly Catholic one. The only way out was annulment.

Protestant reformers rejected this belief and cited parts of New Testament scripture to back themselves up. They then claimed that annulments were so easy to get, that they were pretty much the same thing as a divorce.