Emily Graves spoke with The Marriage Foundation

A new report from The Marriage Foundation has found that after 10 years of marriage the divorce rate for celebrities is 40%. For the rest of the country, the figure is just 20% over the same amount of time.

The report argues that celebrity culture give unrealistic, fairy-tale expectations about marriage and relationships, highlighting the weddings of celebrities such as Britney Spears, whose marriage to Jason Alexander lasted just 55 hours.

The report points to the corrosive effect of celebrity gossip magazines and tabloid newspapers constantly speculating about celebrity marriages being "on the rocks", with celebrity break-ups making better stories than happily-ever-afters.

Emily Graves spoke with Communications Director, Harry Benson, to find out more.

Emily: What does the Marriage Foundation do?

Harry: Marriage Foundation was set up in the beginning of May this year by a high court judge Sir Paul Coleridge, who deals with a lot of high profile divorce cases through his courts. He got fed up with seeing a sea of misery passing through his courts day after day and realised that he had to make a stand for something that was important to him. He believed that marriage was very important and so he and I and various others got talking. We set up the Marriage Foundation. It's non-religious, non-political and we come at it from a research perspective and also from the fact that divorce and family breakdown costs the country huge amounts of money and so much of that is utterly avoidable. That's what we're about. We're about telling the story of marriage without ramming it down anyone's throat.

Emily: You mentioned that you do research and recently you did a piece of research that showed that the rate of divorce is twice the national average for celebrities.

Harry: Yes, one of the things that Sir Paul got quoted on earlier this year was he was railing against what he called the, 'Hello' divorce, i.e. people get married too easily and then he sees all these couples in his courts within months or years afterwards.

We decided to check it out and we looked at all the celeb divorces and marriages in the year 2000/2001 up until 2011. We picked up about 50 to 70 recognisable names in each year in the UK and US and we looked at who was still together and who was split up; from that you can work out an approximation of the divorce rate over time. We averaged it out a bit and we compared it to the UK divorce rate. We've actually commissioned data from the Office for National Statistics. For the average couple in the UK, virtually nobody gets divorced after two years and then it is 20% after ten years; but for celebs it starts at 10% within two years. It seems that people are really not trying very hard in those first two years. The divorce rate for celebs goes up to 40% after ten years instead of 20%. It's double what it is for the rest of us. It's great on the one hand that they're getting married, but it's terrible on the other hand that they seem to be glamorising the wedding over the marriage itself.

Emily: Have you got research into why celebrity marriages haven't been lasting?

Harry: No we haven't and it's a good question. Anything I say about why celebs are splitting up in their droves is speculative at best. To be fair there are 60% of celebs whose marriages last longer than ten years, so there are plenty of them who do perfectly well in the long term and they don't make the papers, because they are not very interesting stories.

That's the problem with marriage as a story, it's very much about us and our future and it's pretty boring to the outsider. It's very exciting when you're in it with all the ups and downs; it's just not much fun for the outsider. I think if I was going to speculate a reason, it would be that so much about celeb culture and let's face it they entertain us; they're great sports people, film stars and TV stars; but their story is about what happens now, rather than what happens in the future. It's also about me, rather than about us. The things that make marriage work, the thinking about us and about our future, are not really things that are part of everyday celeb life.

Emily: Do we have a lack of role models who are married?

Harry: Well interestingly and this is only a thought that has come to me since writing the report, sports stars tend to be more likely to stay together than TV and film stars if one were to generalise. If you're in the sports business, then you're very much about preparing and training and all that sort of stuff. There's an awful lot of effort that goes in to get to that magic moment when you have to go and put in your performance. In a way it's the reverse of marriage. You have the big magic moment of the wedding then you have to put in the work afterwards; so one can see how sports stars might be able to relate to it better than TV stars and film stars, but I don't really know why people are splitting up in those first two years.

Emily: How can meaning be put back into marriage again?

Harry: Marriage is not dead. Sixty two percent of British families are married. Most people want to get married. Most marriages last for a lifetime. There's a good news story out there. The other thing is that divorce rates are actually falling at the moment. They're 20% off their peak in the mid 1990s. The death of marriage is horribly overstated and most marriages do work.

The big issue is really not selling marriage as a story, but making people aware that when you move in with somebody you can get stuck and an awful lot of the current spate of family breakdown, or the increase of family breakdown in the last 30 years is about couples moving in without having really planned out their future. Co-habitation is not all it's cracked up to be. You can easily get stuck in a relationship, which is less than ideal; people who are stuck in relationships, who have moved in without ever actually establishing their sense of direction, or their sense of the future. I think that's probably the biggest issue of our age at the moment.

If people want more information they can go to www.marriagefoundation.org.uk.