No surprises, from the newly published ISTAT data on marriages: a decline in the overall number is confirmed, equal to 173,272 (in 2024), and the January-September 2025 data also indicate a further decline (-5.9%)“confirming – as ISTAT writes – a reduction in nuptiality that has not stopped in the last forty years”.
In short, people are getting married less and less in our country, and this even beyond the decrease in the younger population: there are already fewer young men and women of “marriageable age”, but among these the percentage of those who get married is also lower. Moreover, this structural and progressive crisis of marriage is also confirmed by the data on first marriages: a quarter of these marriages, in fact, are second marriages, and therefore couples in their first marriage are only 130,488, down by 6.7% compared to 2023.
What some French sociologists called démariage, that is having a family without marriage is increasingly present: on the opposite side, as ISTAT always reminds us, “free unions almost quadrupled between the two-year period 2000-2001 and the two-year period 2023-2024 (from around 440 thousand to more than one million and 700 thousand), an increase to be attributed above all to those of celibate men and women”. The alarm launched by the CISF 2020 Report is confirmed, the consolidation of a “post-family” society, which thinks it can do without the family, and therefore also marriage. After all, it is the new generations themselves who believe less and less in marriageto the point that «the share of young people who remain in their family of origin until the age of 35 is equal to 63.3% (in 2012 it was 61.2%). This prolonged stay has an effect on the postponement of first marriages (which) brings the average age at first marriage to 34.8 years for men (+0.1 tenths of a year on 2023) and to 32.8 years for women (+0.1). In 2011 they were 32.6 and 30.1 years respectively, in 2015 33.3 and 30.9 years, in 2019 33.9 and 31.7 years”. In addition to getting married less, therefore, people are getting married later and later (with direct implications also on the birth rate, moreover).
These marital relationships are certainly more fragile than they used to be: separations in 2024 were 75,014 (although down compared to 2023); well over half the number of first marriages, therefore, and of these approximately three-quarters with consensual methods (therefore without a dispute that ends up in Court): bonds that are more liquid than solid, which break easily and are often recomposed in new marriages or in new contexts of cohabitation: a confirmation that the idea that you can start a family without going through marriage is increasingly widespread. Still on the subject of the fragility of the relationship, the prevalent form of asset management is increasingly the separation of assets, while the fiscal community of assets is increasingly marginal: which also appears adequately prudentgiven the degree of conflict in the event of separation: “the choice of the property separation regime (74.8%) remains high (74.3% in 2023) and growing compared to the past (40.9% in 1995 and 62.7% in 2008)”. In fact, starting a family through marriage from a fiscal or patrimonial point of view offers very few advantages or protections, as if to confirm that ultimately “the bond of a couple is a private thing, and not a social resource in which to invest”.
A final fact, stimulating and in some ways going against the trend, concerns families with at least one foreign partner, which were 29,309 (16.9% of the total marriages). Among these, over two thirds (21,002 cases) are mixed marriages (mainly Italian groom with bride of non-Italian citizenship). At least two issues here: firstly, as with the birth rate, the marriage balance in our country would be even more deficient without the contribution of “non-Italian” people living in Italy. Secondly, over twenty thousand couples become a living laboratory of integration every year, far beyond the capacity of our political and communication system to generate and structure an inclusive society. From below and up close, in other words, without hiding the objective difficulties of these mixed marriage projects, the foreigner is less and less someone different from whom we can remain distant: to the point that I can even marry him/her!
