Divorce has been on our minds a lot lately, what with the news of the McCartney marriage and various high-profile court cases. Meanwhile, a change in the law has given Britain’s 4.4m cohabitees a new level of financial protection. The message seems to be coming over loud and clear: marriage isn’t working. Yet nobody is listening.
Couples are marrying for the second and third time, when they’re old enough to know better and rich enough to think twice. Most intriguingly, the generation of twentysomethings whose parents didn’t bother at all (and whose fortysomething friends are still postponing the event) are not just interested in marriage, but eager to get on with it. So the big question is, why? Why is this dated, discredited and deeply ungroovy institution suddenly fashionable again?
Number one, of course: love is powerful medicine. If you get a big enough dose, you are utterly convinced that your situation is unique, so why should you pay any attention to the doom merchants, particularly if you fancy a party? It’s also true that we long to believe — in each other, in permanence, in choices that aren’t dictated by pragmatism and cautious self-interest. We know that relationships are hard work, that the flesh is weak and nothing lasts for ever, but that knowledge gives us no pleasure whatsoever. What does give us pleasure is believing the fairy-tale best. It is a basic human urge to be able to say, “I know in my heart that this is right, without taking out an insurance policy or checking the small print.” Marriage isn’t just the triumph of hope over experience (although it is that, more than ever), it’s the triumph of an urge to trust in life.
Marriage is also — whatever spin you put on it — the final frontier in the relationship game. Nobody has come up with a more definitive statement of a couple’s commitment. Having a child, or buying a house together, has far greater consequences, and yet you only need to talk to people who have done both, but avoided the m-word, to know that marriage is a declaration in another league. Despite the “it’s only a bit of paper” argument, the relative ease with which you can get unmarried, the apparent meaninglessness of the marriage vows in a world where 40% are revoked, it still represents something wonderful, or terrifying, depending on which side of the fence you fall.
And the debate — for or against — is wide open in a way that it hasn’t been for years. Marriage isn’t the safe option it once was, but that in itself has, ironically, rejuvenated it and given it a new, life-affirming aura, like surfing in shark-ridden waters. In 2006, the generation whose parents weighed up the pros and cons like shifting voters are hungry for the chance to do something that separates them from the mass of sleeping-with-each-others. Apparently, the easier it has become to shack up and move on, the more they crave the chance to do something different. Harry Adams, 30, who recently proposed to his girlfriend, sees marriage as the live-strong option. “To live together was the daring thing before, but now, that’s so ordinary. Getting married is the much braver thing to do, I think. The more we know how hard it is to sustain, the more desirable it becomes. It’s like: I’m up to that! There are so many reasons not to, which makes it that much bigger.”
The idea of marriage being the edgy, adventurous choice is a common theme among the young and newly married. Clover Stroud, who married at 24, when none of her friends was anywhere close to taking such a serious step, says it felt “like a brave, life-affirming choice. Anything less seemed a bit lazy”. Amy Jenkins, 39, the writer and creator of This Life, also surprised herself by bucking the trend when she married two years ago. She comes from a background where, she says, the line is “I don’t believe in marriage”, and she subscribed to it wholeheartedly, until she met the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. “A lot of people said, ‘Why not just live together?’, and I did find that quite a hard question to answer. I suppose there’s an absoluteness about marriage. And I think it is completely different for our generation: all the reasons why marriage was considered to be restrictive have evaporated, if you’re coming at it from the place that we are. So now it’s okay to want a little bit of that bondage, because it imposes a structure. I actually feel more empowered by being married.”
There is also the fact that marriage — although no less likely to fail than any other sort of relationship — is the ultimate romantic gesture. “Unmarrieds” are no less in love, no less starry-eyed, but they don’t have the weight of literature and history behind them. Adams describes marriage as “an emotion — one on from love. There is something pure and simple and unambiguous about asking someone to marry you. By comparison, everything else is a compromise. Like me, live with me, have a child with me — anyone can be your girlfriend, but not your wife. Think of the awe in which people hold couples who are happily married for long periods. You can’t just dismiss it. And generally when people do, what they are saying is that they are scared”.
Aah, yes. The looking-over-the-shoulder theory, or what the writer Liza Campbell calls “the ‘one eye on the door’ relationship”. Marriers tend to assume that if a couple aren’t prepared to go the extra distance, it is a sign of indecision. As far as they are concerned, the question is not why, but why not, and the answer to that must be because one of them isn’t sure. “Why ruin a beautiful thing?”, “Who needs some outdated social sanction?”, “How many married couples do you know who are as happy as us?” — these are all excuses, as far as marriers are concerned, for not being able to say those words, “Till death us do part.”
Naturally, non-marriers find such assumptions pretty galling. “Not having to be married has to be a sign of greater security in the relationship,” says Sue Richardson, 43, who has lived with her partner for eight years. “The difference is that you feel free and trusted, and there’s room for negotiation. I think marriage makes you complacent, and the whole idea of it feels negative to me.” She is one of the generation, like Nell Marsh, who thought marriage was for women who didn’t know what else to do.
“In the 1990s, there was definitely an anti-marriage trend,” Marsh says. “Women were forging ahead with their careers, and it just wasn’t a consideration for me or most of my friends. Getting married seemed a bit of a turn-off, like getting a pension. There was something uncool about it.”
She has been with her partner for 10 years, and they have a six-year- old child, yet her impression of marriage remains that it stifles passion. “I don’t think marriages are sexy. The only reason now to get married would be for financial reasons, and that seems particularly unsexy.” She is upfront about her need to feel that her options are not necessarily sealed off. But how realistic is that when you have children and a shared mortgage? “Living with someone is a bit like being a married man who doesn’t wear a wedding ring. You can play it how you want, depending on the situation. But, as time goes on, I’m not sure that I feel I have the same freedom. I’m aware that it’s more of an illusion that keeps me from panicking that life has become too predictable.”
Angela Delworthy, a 56-year-old widow, is a recent convert to the state of living together, for surprisingly similar reasons. “I loved my husband very much, but I was expected to fit into a certain role. Refusing to marry my boyfriend means there’s a whole different dynamic. I am conscious of having a power that I never had in my marriage, and I actually think he respects me more because of my decision.”
Not everyone has such measured reasons for not marrying. A divorced male journalist, who wishes to remain nameless, describes marriage simply as “the quickest way to kill a love affair. When you become a husband, like it or not, there are all these expectations. As boyfriend and girlfriend, you are jollying along together equally; marriage involves the whole notion of caring and providing and having to be this responsible figure. I loathed what it did to both of us, and I wouldn’t touch it again”.
In the end, there are as many reasons for getting married as there are for not. People marry to be looked after, to do better than their parents, to snub their parents, because they are lonely, because they are pregnant, because others have done it before them, and because it seems marginally less scary than splitting up. They just say no because they can’t face the party, because they can’t abide the relations, because they think it’s a patriarchal conspiracy (although the legal precedents of the past few months may have kicked that one into touch), because permanence breeds contempt, because marriage changes people. The truth is, not many of us know too many happy married couples and most of us know a few who are miserable.
But none of that makes the blindest bit of difference to all those who are choosing to be Mr and Mrs over You and Me. Whether or not it makes sense, marriage is making a comeback. “You fall in love and then what?” says Adams. “You need to do something beyond sharing a bed.”
Or as Amber Rudd, one of David Cameron’s 100, puts it: “Why settle for less? It’s like Make Poverty History — yeah, right. But we all go out and give our money and hope, don’t we?”
