A recent report has found that the year 2020 saw many couples opting to maintain their respective status quos, as both the marriage rate and the divorce rate saw dramatic drops, Bloomberg reported. The study, conducted by Bowling Green State University’s Center for Family and Demographic Research, was limited by the fact that it examined marriage and divorce rates in only five states—Arizona, Florida, Missouri, New Hampshire and Oregon—but it seems unlikely that these states are substantially different from others in terms of people's love lives.

Within these five states, the number of divorces and marriages anticipated based on historical trends was higher than the actual number of divorces and marriages, sometimes by a lot. For instance, Florida was expected to have 43,600 divorces in 2020 but only saw 31,300; the Sunshine State, similarly, was anticipated to have 87,400 marriages but saw just 58,500. The only state to buck the trend was Arizona, which saw slightly more divorces than projected.

People delaying their marriages due to the pandemic is understandable, given the logistics of a wedding; the report said that the drop in divorces could be due to the fact that the process can be expensive and, given the economy, people don't want to go through with it until conditions improve.

Bloomberg noted that if the trends were extrapolated to the rest of the country, then there were 339,917 fewer marriages and 191,053 fewer divorces than what's normal; in 2019, there were about 2.2 million marriages and 1 million divorces. If this is the case, though, it is only an acceleration of a larger general trend, as both marriage and divorce are becoming less common. Couples are putting off marriage for longer, and increasingly are forgoing it altogether; other research has indicated that those who do get married tend to be more affluent and so, given that financial stress is a major predictor of divorce, are more likely to stay together.