Marriage Data Finds Two Hard Stretches Behind the Seven-Year Itch

On November 20, 1952, George Axelrod’s comedy The Seven Year Itch opened at the Fulton Theatre in New York. It gave a name to an old suspicion, that a married person gets restless somewhere around the seventh year.

You’ve probably heard the phrase as a joke at a wedding or an anniversary dinner, maybe even aimed at you. Census figures, a ten-year study of newlyweds and a century of divorce counts all point to a hard stretch in many marriages, though none of them shows it arriving on a seven-year timer.

The itch started as a rash

Long before Broadway, the seven-year itch was something you scratched, and the name told you it would hang on. Through the 1800s, if you heard the name in America, it meant a contagious skin complaint, probably scabies or something close to it, that also went by camp itch or army itch. It was miserable enough that you could use it as an insult. In 1845, the Wisconsin Herald and Grant County Advertiser wrote that Illinois had caught something from Missouri “worse than the seven year itch.”

Axelrod moved the itch from the skin to the marriage. His hero has been married seven years when his wife and son leave New York for the summer, and the play ran 1,141 performances before it closed on August 13, 1955.

Billy Wilder’s film version, starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, reached theaters that same year. If you’ve seen one image from it, it’s Monroe’s white dress billowing over a subway grate.

Year	What happened	What the phrase meant
1845	A Wisconsin newspaper uses it as an insult	A contagious skin rash
1952	Axelrod’s play opens on November 20	Restlessness in a marriage
1955	The play closes after 1,141 performances, and the film opens	The same idea, now famous
1999	A ten-year study of newlyweds uses it for a dip near year 8	A measured drop in marital quality
2011	A Census report puts the median failed first marriage at 8 years	A label that roughly fits the data

Two dips in the first decade

Lawrence Kurdek, a psychologist at Wright State University, gave the itch its best-known test. If you had married into his sample, you and your spouse would each have gotten a survey every year for 10 years. Developmental Psychology published the results in September 1999.

Husbands and wives both started high. Marital quality fell fairly fast over roughly the first four years, held steady for a while, then dropped again at about year 8, the stretch the American Psychological Association’s summary called the seven-year itch period. Couples raising only their own biological children showed a steeper slide than couples with no children or with stepchildren.

An older couple sits close together on a wooden porch bench in late-afternoon light, shelling green peas from a basket into a speckled bowl on the table in front of them. The man, mostly bald and clean-shaven, wears a sage cardigan over a cream shirt, and the grey-haired woman wears a cream cardigan over a sage dress, with peach geraniums in a pot beside them. — *Kurdek found his couples through the marriage license lists printed in a Midwest daily newspaper.*

The phrase gets the second dip about right and skips the first one, which you’d hit while your wedding photos still look new.

The study has one weak spot you should weigh. It started with 522 couples, and only 93 were still answering at year 10, so its later years rest on a smaller, more committed group.

If your rough stretch includes fear, threats or harm, that’s outside anything these studies describe, and a counselor or domestic violence hotline is the right first call.

When first marriages end

The Census Bureau’s figure is the one you’ll see quoted most. Its 2011 marriage and divorce report, built on 2009 interviews from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, found that first marriages ending in divorce lasted a median of 8.0 years, for men and women alike. A median means half of those marriages ended sooner and half later, so you shouldn’t read 8.0 as a date on the calendar.

The separation came sooner. Men who later divorced had separated at a median of 6.7 years and women at 6.6 years, with roughly 0.8 to 0.9 years of legal process before the divorce was final.

Separation is when you’d see a couple’s trouble from outside, and at 6.6 to 6.7 years, that is close to Axelrod’s seven.

The Census medians come from 2009 interviews, a decade after Kurdek’s couples filled in their last surveys.

Which years see the most divorces

Newer counts give you a wider view, since they cover every divorce, including second and third marriages. Pew Research Center’s 2025 analysis of 2023 federal survey data found that 16 percent of divorces came in the first five years of marriage and 24 percent in years 5 through 9. Another 22 percent ended marriages of 25 years or longer, which leaves 38 percent for the years between.

Share of 2023 U.S. divorces by length of marriage, from Pew Research Center. The 10-to-24-year share is what remains after Pew’s other three groups.

Pick a 2023 divorce at random and you’re more likely to land on a marriage of 10 to 24 years than on one in the itch window. Pew also put the median length of a marriage ending in divorce at 12 years in 2023, up from 10 years in 2008.

Divorce peaked around 1980

If you married in the last decade, you married into a calmer era for divorce than the late 1970s. The National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University tracks the refined divorce rate, which counts divorces per 1,000 married women. If you counted divorces per 1,000 people instead, the rate would fall every time fewer people married, which makes the refined rate the better number to quote.

If your great-grandparents married around 1900, the rate they lived with was 4.1. It reached 9.2 by 1960 and 14.9 by 1970, then peaked at 22.6 in 1980, a decade after California’s 1969 law opened the no-fault era. It was still 20.5 in 2008, then fell to 14.4 in 2023 and 14.2 in 2024, about 37 percent below the peak.

Divorces per 1,000 married women, from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. Figures through 2000 come from federal vital statistics and later ones from the American Community Survey.

The drop isn’t even across ages. Between 1990 and 2023, the center found, the rate fell for people aged 15 to 44, so if you’re under 45, your group’s rate went down while the rate for people 45 and older rose.

If you’re looking for the group whose divorce rate has climbed, look at people past 45.

Most marriages pass year seven

The Census report has a sunnier table that you’ll rarely see quoted. Among U.S. married couples counted in 2009, 83 percent had been married at least 5 years, 55 percent at least 15 years and 35 percent at least 25 years. About 6 percent had reached 50 years.

Those shares ran 1 to 2 percentage points higher than in 1996, which the Census Bureau tied to steadier divorce rates and longer lives.

So in 2009, a little more than half of the married couples you’d meet had been together 15 years or longer. A slump in a survey average can’t tell you what will happen in your own house.

A dip without a deadline

In the 2009 Census data, first marriages that ended in divorce reached separation at a median of 6.6 to 6.7 years and a final decree at 8.0. Line that up with Kurdek’s study and you’ll find his couples reporting their second slump at about the same point. The seven in the phrase came from an old rash and a hit play, and your own marriage doesn’t run on its timer.

Next time someone blames the seven-year itch, ask the longest-married couple you know which years were hardest, and see whether their answer matches Kurdek’s two dips.