UK: Lesbian couples twice as likely as gay men to end civil partnership as ‘divorces’ up by 20%. And yet the image at the top is of two women kissing rather than breaking up. Maybe they’re kissing goodbye.

Gunnar Andersson, professor of demography at Stockholm University, has found in successive studies that women in Norway, Sweden and Denmark are twice as likely to dissolve their civil partnerships than men. He said: “This reflects trends in a heterosexual marriage because women are more prone to say they want to marry – but they’re also more likely to initiate a divorce. Women usually have higher demands on relationship quality, that’s often been said in studies. Even if you control for age there is still a trend of more women ending partnerships than men.”

Previous figures show British women in heterosexual relationships are more likely to file for divorce than men. Women initiated the divorce in two thirds of cases in the UK in 2011.

If a man left his wife because she lost her looks, would we say that he just has “higher demands on relationship quality”? How absurd.