Partners’ Age Difference and Marital Dissolution in Italy. A Cohort Comparison

Among the factors related to marital disruption, age assortative mating (who marries whom in terms of age) has received less attention than others. In this study, we study the association between partners’ age difference and marital disruption in Italy, a late-comer country in divorce legislation and highly conservative in its culture and institutions. We also show how this association varies across marriage cohorts. We employ data from “Families, social subjects and life cycle” (FSS), collected in 2016 by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). We analyse micro-level retrospective information on first-marriage histories between the 1970s and the 1990s through an event-history approach. Results show that age hypogamous couples (where the woman is older than the man) have a higher likelihood of marital disruption compared to couples where the wife is the same age or younger than her husband. However, this higher risk reduces among the youngest cohorts. We discuss the possible drivers of this change in light of cultural changes that occurred in recent decades.