According to a recent official report on family living, married couples are now a minority, with only 48.1 per cent of people aged over 16 recorded as married, and those that would once have been celebrating matrimonial bliss were now living together under the same roof without the certificate.

The estimates that mean married couples are now a minority, also showed that nearly one in 10 people who have shunned marriage now live together as cohabitants.

The report also found that adult children living with their parents because they cannot afford their own home has resulted in a rise in those same adults choosing not to live in a partnership, while a quarter of the population have never married or lived with anybody.

There has been a continuous fall in the ‘popularity’ of marriage over the past five decades. The figures, which covered living arrangements between 2002 and 2015, show that the number of married couples who live together dropped below half the population in 2008 and is now at its lowest point since records began. While the decline in marriage has been charted since the early 1970s, the rise of cohabitation has happened over the past 25 years.