Lesbian brides beat gay grooms in rush down aisle

Lesbian brides have outnumbered gay grooms by three to two since marriage equality laws took effect in 2018, and they are also divorcing at a higher rate.

Nicolette Lewis and Lana De Angelis are two of the 10,440 women who have married other women in NSW from January 2018 to the end of 2023.

Lana De Angelis and Nicolette Lewis at their coffee shop Ruby Lonesome in Marrickville.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

The figures from NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages show 7942 men have married other men in the state over the same timeframe.

Lewis and De Angelis, owners of the Ruby Lonesome cafe in Marrickville, were together for 10 years before their wedding in 2019.

“Having that equal representation and the same document and the same words as other people was absolutely huge for me, and I found it incredibly validating,” said Lewis.

The couple married in what they described as a “big extravaganza with a DIY ethos” at Lewis’ grandparents’ property on the Mid North Coast, in front of 100 family and friends.

“We just both had the best fun of our lives, and it was incredibly emotional,” De Angelis said. “We got engaged before same-sex marriage was legalised, and we had made the decision to wait to have any sort of ceremony until it was equal in the eyes of the law, so we were engaged for four years.”

Neither woman was surprised that lesbian and female bisexual marriage was more prevalent than same-sex male marriage, with De Angelis saying that there was some truth to the “old trope that lesbians moved in together after day one”.

Lana De Angelis and Nicolette Lewis on their wedding day.Credit: Blake Heywood Sanders

Relationships Australia NSW chief executive Elisabeth Shaw said women were socialised to desire a life partner and commit to long-term relationships, and this was a gendered experience rather than one based on sexual orientation.

“There are a lot of community norms around women being settled in a relationship and monogamous,” Shaw said. “Even in 2024 there is greater pressure for women to do that and greater acceptance of men ‘playing the field’.”

The Births, Deaths and Marriages figures show female couples were 57 per cent of same-sex marriages registered in NSW by December 2023.

The state’s same-sex divorce figures are broadly in line with this. Figures from the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia show female couples were 58 per cent of the 560 same-sex divorces in NSW from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2023.

Nationally, female couples were 60 per cent of the 22,226 same-sex marriages and 66 per cent of the 1031 same-sex divorces recorded by the Australian Bureau of Statistics from 2018 to 2022.

It’s not possible to calculate a divorce rate because many same-sex couples married overseas, especially before marriage equality laws passed in Australia. But census data gives an early indication that same-sex marriages are so far ending in divorce at a higher rate than marriages overall.

Lana De Angelis and Nicolette Lewis were engaged for four years while waiting for marriage equality.Credit: Blake Heywood Sanders

In the 2021 census, there were 8.7 million marriages overall, including nearly 24,000 same-sex marriages. In ABS national figures for 2022, there were about 49,000 divorces overall, including 558 same-sex divorces.

That implies about 0.6 per cent of the people who were married at the time of the census in August 2021 divorced the following year. A much higher proportion – about 2.3 per cent – of the same-sex marriages that existed in 2021 wound up in divorce in 2022.

Dr Lixia Qu, senior research fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, said same-sex couples were younger than the underlying married population, and older people were statistically less likely to divorce.

“Same-sex couples who got married are in their 30s, 40s and 50s,” Qu said. “The older age groups are quite a significant demographic in general marriage because it includes couples who have been married together for a long time, and this age group is not represented in same-sex marriage.”

Qu added that other demographic differences were that same-sex couples were less likely to have children, less religious, and more likely to be educated professionals than the general married population.

In 2022 nearly a third of divorcing couples of any gender separated within five years, with one in eight divorces finalised within that time frame, ABS figures show. More than half of divorcing couples separated within 10 years of marriage and nearly 40 per cent finalised their divorces within the decade.

Shaw said social context played a role in marriage decisions for people regardless of sexual orientation, and this might have been a factor after the marriage equality victory.

“A lot of people were strongly encouraged by friends and family who said ‘here’s your chance’, so there may have been people caught up in the affirmation … rather than considering what was right for their relationship,” she said.

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