One of the features of the last 50 years is that marriage started to be presented as a less brave or exciting way of living than the much more adventurous alternatives.   Marriage, indeed, came to be seen as being for tradition-bound people who had not succeeded in ‘breaking free’ from the constraints that traditional society had put on them.  Marriage was a crutch for people who needed one; the bold needed no such ‘artificial’ supports.  If a relationship was strong, it would support itself.  If it was weak, then no ‘structure’ could or should save it.

But what if that judgment was plain wrong?  What if marriage actually gives us a stability that we all need to make our most important relationship work long-term?

Statistics speak volumes

Here is what the statistics show – and they are remarkable and unmistakable.

According to the 2001 Census, 59% of households with children are married, 11% are co-habiting and 22% lone parents.  In 2003, an estimated 88,000 children under 5 were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents, compared with about 31,000 children under 5 whose married parents divorced.  Thus, three quarters of all family breakdowns affecting young children now involve unmarried parents.[1] In a new analysis of Census data, 60% of families remain intact until their children are sixteen.  Of these, 97% are married![2]

Just one in 11 married couples split before their child’s fifth birthday, compared to one in three of unmarried couples.[3] By the child’s sixteenth birthday, the advantages of marriage are even greater.  In the words of Harry Benson, a leading specialist in this field, “The evidence is irrefutable.  Unmarried parents are five times more likely to break up than married parents”[4].

Consequences for the children

And the consequences to the children of their parents splitting are now well documented.  Thus, children living in lone-parent households are:

-       1.8 times more likely to have psychosomatic health symptoms[5]

-       2.5 times more likely to be sometimes or often unhappy[6]

-       2 times as likely to have a mental health problem[7]

-       2.7 times more likely to play truant from school[8]

-       3 times more likely to be excluded from school[9]

-       2 times as likely to leave school with no qualifications[10]

-       5 times as likely to have experienced physical abuse and emotional maltreatment[11]

-       2 times as likely to run away from home[12]

-       2 times (boys) as likely to take drugs by the age of 15.[13]

-       at least 2 times as likely to be badly behaved.[14]

Although 20% of children live in lone-parent families, 70% of young offenders identified by Youth Offending Teams come from lone-parent families.[14]

It is often argued that, where a relationship is going wrong, it is less bad for the children that the union be ended, than continued amidst quarrelling and strife.  However, once again the statistics tell a different story.  No less than 88% of US studies reviewed showed an overall negative effect of family breakdown on children, and a massive 94% or non-US studies showed the same.  In the words of Harry Benson, “It is clear that the disadvantages of family breakdown consistently outweigh the advantages”.[15]

Bad press

Meanwhile, marriage has continued to get a bad press (how many happy marriages do you see in films, dramas, even sit-coms?).  Modern life has given to both marriage and co-habitation a real sense of instability – partly because there is now less economic dependence between couples than there once was.  But, strangely, the ‘flak’ from the modern insecurity of relationships has almost entirely fallen on marriage itself, even though (as the above statistics clearly show) marriage has a very, very much better record than co-habitation at dealing with precisely those problems.

So why does marriage still get such a bad press?

Somehow, in the public view, the ‘freedom’ of just living together is an advantage.  If it doesn’t work, you can opt out, without all the pain of an actual divorce.  However, in practice, is the pain of splitting up really so greatly lessened?  Does the sense of rejection or abandonment really cut less deep?  And what of the cumulative sense of failure that comes from having had a number of relationships that ended badly?

Setting the bar higher

What marriage obviously does is that it sets the bar higher; it makes the step of marrying a major step to take.  It calls for a clear decision.  And that is the point: we actually get to decide.  There is an institution, which is public and which is ‘for life’, and which requires perhaps the highest quality decision of our life.

And the problem with the alternatives is that, because the bar is set so much lower, it is too easy to drift in and out, avoiding real decisions.  If the consequences of failure really were minor, then a “try it and see” attitude might make sense.  But in fact huge hurt comes from intimacy broken and rejected.  Marriage alone provides a safe context for intimacy so that you can let your heart lead you without fear of being wounded in the process.  Commitment is safety.  Without that safe context, we are potentially setting ourselves (and our partners) up for a fall.  A series of falls, and all too often one finds oneself wanting to give up on falling in love altogether, and saying “never again” to trusting the opposite sex.

This is different

The institution that enshrines commitment is marriage.  It makes you legally one; it makes your children legally the offspring of that secure partnership; and it is a public declaration, to be honoured by all people, that these two people are no longer available for anyone else.

What of people who have already had many relationships?  Is marriage still any kind of an answer?   Arguably, marriage in that context is just as important, but for a different reason.  It offers the possibility of making a clear break with the past, of demonstrating that “this is different”; that “this is for life”, that “this is secure”.

It is not just the bold statement that “this is different”; it is the submission to an institution that will, by its structure, help us make it so; and it is (in its religious context for believers) a moment to step away from the past and offer up that vulnerable flower of a relationship to God for his blessing, in the expectation that strength can come to fill the void.  That spiritual aspect is rather like the making of a concrete step, where you first put in place a flimsy wooden perimeter of planks and then pour the concrete into the shape provided.  We make the shape; we ask God to pour in the concrete to make it strong.

Finally, marriage is actually very romantic.  The idea of two people falling in love and then committing themselves to each other for life, becoming essentially one, and living their lives together thereafter, is the dream of most people.  A MORI poll of 805 adults in 1999 asked which lifestyle they would most prefer, 68% chose being married and with children, while just 4% choose cohabitation with a partner and children.   In another poll, nearly 90% of young people said they would wish to get married at some time in the future.[16]

So why, when it comes to it, is there so much hesitation towards the idea of actually getting married?  Why, for example, have we reached a point where 45% of children are now born to unmarried couples?

Hesitation

One of the big factors here is fear of failure, which has been fanned by the experience of family breakdown over the last two generations.   In particular, those who have witnessed the breakdown of their parents’ relationship will often carry a wound, which creates a deep nervousness about committing.  Others will be influenced by the family breakdown they have seen amongst their circle of friends or within their extended family.  Because family breakdown is so commonplace, the fear will have joined with the reality to make us doubly anxious.

But it is the typical response to that anxiety that is all wrong!  Rejecting getting married because it could fail is like choosing to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel because one is scared of heights.  Co-habiting carries by far the greatest risks in this area and it simply doesn’t make sense to choose the riskier option out of fear of the risks!

The culture

Once again, what is required here is a cultural shift.  Our contemporary culture has done us all a great disservice by taking the problem of unstable relationships, which is real, and compounding it by making marriage – the best answer to that instability – unfashionable.  The truth of the issue needs to be exposed and highlighted, again and again.  Free though we will remain to make our choices, it is imperative that our choices should be made with understanding and without relentless pressure, based on false ideas of modernity or ‘freedom’, to reject the very thing that is most likely to give us, and our children, the security and happiness we need.

And it isn’t just about our individual needs.  It is also now about preserving the stability of society as a whole.  Chart the statistics (cited above) about what family breakdown does to children’s future academic achievement, mental health, susceptibility to crime, drugs or pure unhappiness, and one can see what the prognosis for society as a whole really is.  As Professor Brenda Almond states, “The threat to human communities in their continuity represented by the decline and fragmentation of the family poses the greatest long-term challenge facing Western countries”.[17] For society’s sake, as well as for our own sakes, to continue with a culture that pushes us, like lemmings, over so dangerous a cliff edge is daft as well as wrong.