Court closures, child care collapse, and forced proximity created a pressure cooker that reshaped when and why women left their marriages
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In 2020, the U.S. divorce rate fell to its lowest point in 40 years. After reaching a record low of 14.0 divorces per 1,000 married women in both 2020 and 2021, the rate rose in 2022 to 14.56, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.
The drop was not a sign that marriages had improved. It was a sign that the system for ending them had seized up.
When COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, family courts across the country went dark. Couples unable to file for divorce cited not only court closures and backlogs, but also financial reasons related to COVID-19, according to research published in the Journal of Family Psychology.
The backlog was measurable. According to a study by Bowling Green State University researchers Wendy Manning and Krista Payne, the U.S. had a shortfall of about 191,000 divorces in 2020 compared with what would have been expected based on prior trends. A follow-up study published in Socius by Krista Westrick-Payne, Manning, and Lisa Carlson found a 12% reduction in administrative divorce counts across the 35 states with available data.
At the same time, the child care infrastructure that enabled many parents to work and consider major life changes collapsed. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, 63% of child care centers and 27% of family child care homes closed in spring 2020. Employment at child daycare services fell 33.9% between April 2019 and April 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a decline more than twice the national rate. For a parent considering divorce, the disappearance of child care removed a basic precondition: the ability to envision managing alone.
Lockdowns did not just delay legal proceedings. They intensified the factors that lead to marriage failure. The broader pattern of women initiating divorce in heterosexual marriages, a dynamic that predates the pandemic, took on new dimensions under forced confinement.
Paula Pietromonaco, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Nickola Overall, professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, published a framework in American Psychologist arguing that COVID-19-related external stress would increase harmful dyadic processes such as hostility, withdrawal, and less responsive support, undermining couples' relationship quality. Their prediction rested on the vulnerability-stress-adaptation model, which holds that these harmful effects would be amplified by pre-existing vulnerabilities, including attachment insecurity and depression.
The effects varied. "There's huge variability in couples' experiences," Pietromonaco told UMass Amherst. "People already struggling before the pandemic are going to be hit harder."
The gender dimension was stark. A 2021 study by Nina Waddell and colleagues at the University of Auckland, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, found that during a nationwide lockdown, both women and men agreed that women shouldered the increased burden of domestic labor. A greater and more unfair share of parenting and housework predicted increases in relationship problems and decreases in relationship satisfaction for women.
This pattern held even when men acknowledged the imbalance. Women and men disagreed about the extent of the inequity: Women reported doing more housework and having less personal time than men acknowledged.
Research from Washington University in St. Louis, reported by the World Economic Forum, found that between March and April 2020, mothers' work hours fell four to five times as much as fathers', with mothers scaling back about 5%, or two hours per week, while fathers' work hours remained stable. The Center for American Progress estimated that 4.5 million child care slots could be lost permanently, with the risk of mothers leaving the labor force amounting to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.
When courts reopened and child care began to recover in 2022, the question was whether the divorce backlog would clear and then return to the pre-pandemic trend. The data suggest something more complex.
The number of divorces filed began climbing after 2021. Nearly 990,000 women reported divorcing in 2022, up from about 949,000 the year before, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. By 2023, over 1.8 million Americans had divorced, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal data.
These numbers remain below the pre-pandemic trendline. The overall trend in the divorce rate since 2008 remained downward despite the slight increase from 2021 to 2022, and the 2022 rate was below pre-pandemic levels. That could indicate that the post-pandemic bump was simply pent-up demand working through the system.
But the pandemic may have altered something less visible than filing rates: Women's willingness to tolerate arrangements they had previously endured. As Cindy DiTiberio, author of the Mother Lode newsletter, told Quartz in a recent interview, the pandemic "stripped away the buffers that had made many marriages workable, or at least tolerable."
Some women in heterosexual households became more aware of and willing to challenge unequal labor arrangements within their homes during the pandemic, according to a review of gendered labor research published in Sociological Perspectives. The review found that while men often did more unpaid domestic labor than before the pandemic, women continued to do more overall, and gendered divisions of labor were reorganized in ways that maintained patriarchal gender relations.
The CDC's crude divorce rate, the most cited national figure, has well-documented limitations. Several states, including California, do not report divorce data to the agency. The measure counts divorces per total population, diluting the signal with children and unmarried adults.
The NCFMR's adjusted rate, which counts divorces per 1,000 married women, offers more precision. By that measure, the adjusted divorce rate fell about 10%, from 15.5 in 2019 to 14.0 in 2020. The bounce to 14.56 in 2022 was real but modest.
What the numbers cannot capture is the lag between the pandemic's psychological impact and its legal consequences. Divorce is a slow process. In many states, six months is the shortest time most divorces take to finalize, but the process often takes closer to 18 months. The couples who recognized during lockdown that their marriages were failing may not have filed until 2022, 2023, or later.
Meanwhile, the cultural aftermath continues to build. The wave of divorce-focused media, from podcasts to TikToks to bestselling memoirs, maps to the timeline of post-pandemic emergence. These accounts function less as cause than as confirmation: Women who lived through the pandemic's domestic reckoning are now, in growing numbers, describing what they saw.
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