Feb 14, 2022 5 min read

If one believes “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” then it’s hardly surprising couples who had weathered life’s storms called it quits during the pandemic.

“Marriage, at the very best of times, is difficult,” said attorney Samuel Davis, a founding partner of Davis & Davis in Uniontown. “It requires both parties pulling together for a common goal. During the pandemic, I just found that the stress on marriage itself was very, very great. The pandemic … brought people to a place where they may never have gotten had there never been a pandemic.”

Across the globe and throughout the United States, couples buckled under the pressures of health risks, financial uncertainty and close quarters. In July 2020, LegalTemplates, an online company founded by Carnegie Mellon graduates that guides people through the creation of legal documents, announced its divorce agreement sales were up 34% over the same period in 2019.

“There definitely was an uptick in the beginning,” said Leigh Lyons, an attorney at Lyons Law in Washington. “I think the fact that people were working from home – for lack of a better term, they got sick of each other. People who had been considering divorce for a while, once the pandemic came and they were stuck together, I think that kind of pushed them at that point to move forward. I think this was just a breaking point. People thought, ‘Life is short. Why are we staying in a relationship that doesn’t make me happy?'”

Lyons said at the beginning of the pandemic, she handled divorce cases in which couples had been married for a long time. Adam Belletti, a lawyer with Pollock Morris in Waynesburg, said he, too, saw an uptick in divorces between couples who were married for decades.

“For whatever reason, I have had more divorces in couples married 10-plus years than less than 10 years,” Belletti said in an email. “A lot more people are filing for irreconcilable differences than for issues like infidelity. There is less opportunity to date during the pandemic and more opportunity to be home arguing with someone with whom you are no longer compatible.”

Belletti noted that through summer of 2020, his firm saw a decrease in divorces that slowly ticked upward through early 2021.

While the world outside grew increasingly frightening, couples struggled to cope with the added stresses of shifting routines and family dynamics.

“The excessive stress caused by the pandemic, I think, caused people to drink perhaps more than they normally would, use drugs more than they normally would. There was a loss of income,” Davis said. “There were parenting stresses based on some of the remote learning. The stress of actually spending so much time together and then coming to the realization that you don’t have as much in common as you had hoped.”

The divorce rate spiked globally near the beginning of the pandemic, but in the U.S. and elsewhere, those rates have since leveled off. Historically, the southern U.S. sees more divorces annually, with northeastern states touting the lowest divorce rates in the nation.

And, perhaps surprisingly, if you’ve read the headlines, Pennsylvania’s divorce rate is down 15% since 2011, and the rate has hovered around 48% since 2019.

in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, there were fewer divorces in 2020 and 2021 than pre-pandemic.

“Last year, 2021, we filed 123 new divorce cases,” said Paul Ondash, first deputy prothonotary in Greene County.

That’s six fewer cases than the county opened in 2020, and 13 fewer divorce cases than in 2019.

Washington County had 553 divorce filings in 2020 and 551 in 2021 (2021 numbers have not yet been finalized), compared to 560 in 2019. And in Fayette County, the number of divorce cases filed in 2020 dropped from 440 in 2019 to 402 in 2020.

Interestingly, the number of marriages has also dipped in recent years. In Pennsylvania, marriage has been steadily declining since 2016, dropping from 73,876 that year to 58,960 in 2020.

One thing that did increase during the pandemic: reports of domestic violence.

“I usually don’t really mix PFAs (protection from abuse orders) with divorce and custody,” said Lyons. “Domestic violence is such a sensitive topic. I think domestic violence also went up. Those definitely rose. I think the same types of reasons: people being in close contact really having no escape to the outside world.”

Belletti said along with an uptick in divorces, he saw an increase in custody cases.

“I think we have seen a rise in relationships that matured too quickly. Unmarried couples who have children together that end up not being very compatible and then separating has been more common over the last 18 months,” he said. “Housing has also played a role in all of this. Greene County, in particular, has had limitations on available and appropriate housing. This has been impacted by lack of turnover due to the eviction moratoriums. I think this led to more people moving in together before marriage than before the pandemic.”

Living together out of necessity, Belletti added, can lead to a stressful home life.

The uncertainties of remote schooling and work, financials and shifting family dynamics are easing up as more people get vaccinated, return to work and venture out to restaurants and shows. Belletti said things are “mostly back to ‘normal'” as far as divorce filing rates are concerned, and Davis wonders if we don’t see a rise in marriage post-pandemic.

“The first year was really the hardest,” said Lyons. “March, April 2020 to the following year. It’s tapered off since then. They’ve learned to adapt by now.”