Love, law, and Lebanon's divorce crisis

There was a time when a Lebanese wedding was a wager on permanence, a public vow made in defiance of everything else. That confidence has not survived the last few years intact. The institution of marriage absorbed life’s turmoil unevenly, and with lasting damage. Fewer couples are choosing to marry at all, and those who do are waiting longer to commit. Yet the ones who do walk down the aisle are separating at a terrifying pace. To understand it, The Beiruter turned to the people closest to the numbers and the heartbreak alike: Mohamad Chamseldine, a researcher at Information International, and Elie Rahme, a Beirut-based divorce attorney who has watched, case by case, exactly how a marriage in Lebanon comes apart.

The statistical revelations

According to Mohamad Chamseldine, Policy Research Specialist at Information International, marriage registrations in Lebanon collapsed from 37,099 in 2015 to a low of 25,620 in 2024, a direct casualty of the country's economic and social crises, before rebounding somewhat to 32,852 in 2025. Divorce, by contrast, has proven far more stable. Cases rose gradually from 7,112 in 2015 to 8,541 in 2023, dipped to 6,894 in 2024, then jumped to a record 8,823 in 2025. This represents an 8% increase in divorce rates.

The takeaway, Chamseldine said, is a "changing landscape of family formation and dissolution": marriages are increasingly fragile and slow to form, while divorces, once couples decide to go through with them, have stayed remarkably resilient regardless of the surrounding economic chaos.

Why marriages are ending

Elie Rahme, a Beirut-based divorce lawyer, explained the most prominent reasons behind divorce cases, "Social media, infidelity, too little money, and too much money." Beneath the list is a collapse of the willingness to sacrifice that marriage used to demand. "There's no more of the idea that marriage requires sacrifice from both sides," he says. Financial independence has changed the calculation for many women: "She's become independent from her husband, she pays her own way, she does everything herself."

A newer pattern has emerged alongside it, Rahme notes, unemployed husbands leaning financially on working wives. "Women tell me, 'this person brings nothing to this house by his presence what am I supposed to do, stay with him?" Personality clashes and what he calls plain "selfishness" from both partners feed into the same trend. Infidelity, he's careful to clarify, is rarely the root cause ; it is the trigger that surfaces problems that were already there.

Money does not merely cause divorces, it may delay them. Rahme describes a recurring phenomenon: couples who have been separated for years, informally, only formalizing the divorce once they can finally afford the legal process. "The financial side plays into the timing, filing a case costs money, and that affects when someone decides to go through with it," he says, pushing back on the common assumption that lawyers and courts price people out deliberately. "If someone can't afford it, we help as lawyers, but court fees have gotten expensive because the court runs on those fees to pay its staff and judges."

The 2019 currency collapse reshaped the financial mechanics of divorce directly. "Court fees are now entirely in dollars," Rahme says. Child support, once negotiated in Lebanese lira worth a few dollars, is now routinely renegotiated and re-filed in hard currency, with claims ranging from $500 to $2,000-3,000 a month depending on the paying spouse's income.

Rahme explained that his court alone sees a fluctuating annual average of roughly 500 to 700 filings, and across the full spectrum of Christian denominations, Maronite, Catholic, Orthodox, and Syriac courts alike, divorce and separation cases now make up 35 to 40 percent of all personal-status filings.

The impact of custody on divorce

It is crucial to consider the impact of the dissolution of a marriage on the family built around it. Christian religious courts do not recognize "custody" at all, only "guardianship" (hirasa), which under a newer law passed by parliament is automatically granted to the mother until the child turns 14, the age at which children can legally choose which parent to live with. Guardianship, Rahme stresses, is granted to the mother even when she was the one found to have been unfaithful: "the court doesn't strip a mother of guardianship over her children, an unfit wife isn't the same thing as an unfit mother."

The Muslim courts operate on a different logic entirely, and one that has shifted meaningfully over the past two decades. Custody rules under Sunni and Shia law traditionally set a much younger cutoff for automatic maternal custody, historically as young as seven for boys and nine for girls in Sunni jurisprudence, after which custody could revert to the father. That threshold became the target of a sustained campaign by Lebanese women's rights groups, who argued it tore children away from their mothers at an age most families considered far too young. These campaigns eventually succeeded in raising the Sunni custody age closer to 12. Shia courts, which follow separate jurisprudence, have seen less sweeping reform, and custody outcomes there still tend to hinge more heavily on a father's right to reclaim children once they reach a set age, regardless of the mother's fitness as a parent.

Younger couples, Rahme said, are approaching separation itself differently. "The new generation is a bit more aware, they say, why should I fight with my wife over the kids, over everything, just to get divorced? Let's sit down, agree, draft a settlement on custody, on sharing time, and submit it for a ruling." Couples staying together "for the sake of the kids" has become less common, he adds, as more parents recognize the arrangement often does more harm to children than the divorce itself.

Rahme stresses the period before the wedding, not after it. Real compatibility, he argued, including physical and emotional compatibility discovered honestly before marriage, matters more than people admit. "So many marriages fail not because love disappeared, but because two people never really knew each other going in," he says. "Communication before marriage, knowing where the other person is weak, what they love, what they don't, that's what we're missing. By the time people find out after the wedding, the damage is already done."

The humanity behind the data

What emerges from the numbers and the interviews alike is a portrait of what it takes for a marriage to survive. Lebanon’s political, economic, and social state did not create these fractures so much as it removed the pressure that used to hold them shut, the fear of being alone, the inability to afford a lawyer, the silence families once mistook for peace. What remains is a more honest reckoning, couples increasingly unwilling to wait out an unhappy union for its own sake, courts adapting old religious codes to new financial realities, and a rising generation determined not to repeat their parents' compromises. As Lebanon continues to change, the institution of marriage is changing with it, raising broader questions not only about love and commitment, but about the social, legal, and economic realities that determine whether a marriage can endure.