ANALYSIS:
Marriage, my father used to say, is an institution, usually pausing for a moment before adding his little joke – “and who the hell wants to live in an institution?” Well, apparently he did. He was married to my mother for more than 40 years until his early death, and as far as I could tell very happily, despite the inevitable ups and downs.
Perhaps it was my parents’ example – and love, of course – that encouraged me to marry at the age of 23. We have remained married for the past 48 years, with no regrets, nowhere near the length of time necessary to receive the murmurs of approval and congratulation that often come on television programmes when elderly couples reveal a union of 60 or more years. This week I attended a 100th birthday lunch for a friend who had been married for 70 years until the death of his wife – lots of murmurs of approval and congratulations there.
During the war, she had worked at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, and having signed the Official Secrets Act had kept to herself exactly what she did until the day she died. It’s said that a marriage should have no secrets, but what happened at Bletchley Park is obviously an exception.
Why do people get married? Because they fall in love is the obvious answer. Beyond that, for security, to raise children, to honour a formal commitment made in the presence of family, friends, community and, in some cases, whatever God you may happen to believe in. But until now, not many of us would have put reducing our likelihood to get diabetes at the top of the list.
However, that is the conclusion of the report published this week by researchers at the universities of Ottawa in Canada and Luxembourg, which suggests that even an unhappy marriage may help prevent heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
Scientists examined data over a period of 11 years from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing on 3335 adults aged 50 to 89 who did not have diabetes at the start of the study. Seventy-six per cent of people in the analysis were married or living together. The study found that being married or living with a partner was linked to healthier blood sugar levels. Couples were questioned on the degree of happiness and contentment in the marriage – whether they felt supported in the union and understood each other’s feelings, or conversely whether they got on each other’s nerves and criticised each other – compared with blood sugar level.
The study concluded that the quality of the marriage did not make a massive amount of difference to the average levels of blood glucose; it was simply being in a marriage that appeared to have a protective effect against type 2 diabetes, preventing people’s blood sugar rising dangerously.
So even if the rows about loading the dishwasher or squeezing the toothpaste in the middle might drive you to distraction, don’t even think about walking out. The report joins the growing body of evidence that testifies to the health benefits of marriage. Figures released last year by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that married men and women of all ages consistently had the lowest mortality rates between 2010 and 2019, and a lower premature death rate than those who are single, divorced or widowed.
So yes, few people marry thinking about their blood glucose levels or pondering mortality. But then again, nowadays, fewer people are thinking of marrying at all.
Marriage rate
“Wedlock is a padlock,” as the Laura Lee song has it, “if you take the vows, the vows you must keep, locked in a world of misery” – a rather gloomy view, but one that more and more people seem to agree with.
According to the ONS, the rate of marriages between men and women in the UK fell to a record low three years ago. A total of 213,122 heterosexual couples tied the knot in 2019, which is down 50 per cent from the peak in 1972 and the lowest number since 1888. And fewer people are choosing to marry in a church; not even 20 per cent walking down an aisle that same year (a separate ONS survey shows that nearly a quarter of all couples who live together are not married or in a civil partnership). While the rate of marriages is in decline, so too is the rate of divorce. Divorce rates began to rise through the 1960s, as the social pressures to remain in an unhappy marriage began to fall away, peaked in the 1990s and have fallen consistently since then.
So while more people have chosen not to marry, those who do have a better chance of the union surviving than in their parent’s generation. Nearly a quarter of a million weddings took place in 2001; 63 per cent of those couples are still married 20 years later.
This may have something to do with people making the decision to marry later in life. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the average age for marriage stood at just under 25 years, but by 2019 this age had hit 32.8 – the highest on record. For a man born in the 1940s, there was an 80 per cent chance they’d be married by 30. For someone born in 1990, this figure drops below 20 per cent.
Thinking of my own contemporaries, by today’s standards, I would guess that most married in their 20s; some ended in early divorce – call it a trial run – but they are now in second marriages that have lasted 30 to 40 years. Evidently it was just a question of finding the right institution to live in.
Economic disparity
A report published this week by the Marriage Foundation, a charity that was set up by former High Court judge Sir Paul Coleridge, and which advocates for the institution of marriage, suggests an interesting economic disparity between those who choose to marry or not.
Analysing statistics related to babies born in 2021, the report found that seven of 10 new parents who it classed as highly paid were married, compared with just one in three on lower incomes. And while marriage rates have declined across the board, it said the trend “is far more advanced among lower income than higher income households”.
While 87 per cent of high earners (over £43,000 - about NZ$82,300) marry; only 24 per cent of low earners (under £16,000) marry. “The rich,” it says, “get married (and stay together); the poor don’t.”
Poverty in itself is a big disincentive to marriage – with all the economic burdens that may come with it. For instance, the prospect of having to support someone else for life (whether or not you ever get a joint bank account).
Harry Benson, the research director of the Marriage Foundation, cites four reasons why income might be a major factor in this. The first, he believes, is the fear of divorce, “particularly in the lower income groups with the fear of poverty that it brings with it”.
The second is the cost of weddings. “Wedding magazines, the coverage of glamorous celebrity weddings and social media, have created this huge expectation that you have to spend a fortune, and would have you believe the average cost of weddings is £30,000. It isn’t. About 4 per cent of couples spend that amount. The typical couple spend in the region of £5-10,000.”
My own wedding cost about $25. We married in the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, where we were living at the time. The judge had just come down from sentencing someone to death, and sentenced us to life. (My wife will kill me for saying that.) The sole witness was a clerk, Mrs Lopez. Our wedding banquet was a chocolate cake from Safeway. It was an occasion imbued with a romance that no amount of white tulle, bouquets of flowers or embarrassing best man speeches could ever hope to match.
The third reason is what Benson calls “public messaging” and government policy that has long ceased to provide direct encouragement and support for married families, or even separate being married from living together – this, he says “despite the fact that 83 per cent of the current cabinet are married, and 93 per cent have been married or are married now”.
“The political class marry in their droves and yet insist that it doesn’t really matter, because people don’t want to judge, which is fair enough. But they are overlooking the benefits. The gap in outcome for society between married and cohabiting families is huge, in terms of stability, unwanted lone parenthood, poverty and all sorts of things.”
But the biggest factor driving the fall in marriages among the less well-off, the foundation claims, is a British benefits system that includes a “couple penalty”. “Everyone on benefits knows this,” Benson says, “but no politician will talk about it. The way welfare is calculated is based on household income, so if someone moves in with you, your tax credits and universal credit go down; therefore there is a massive incentive for welfare couples either to lie or to pretend that they’re living apart, or just not to live together in order to get more universal credit.”
Children’s health
While staying together, no matter how unhappily, may be good for your health, there is powerful evidence to say it’s a better thing where children are involved, and a better thing for society.
Of course, many people will remain in unhappy relationships, married or not, “for the sake of the children”. Figures released last year by the ONS showed that in 2021 for the first time since records began more than half of children were born outside of wedlock. And according to the study by the foundation, if current trends continue as they are, any child born today in the UK has more than a one in three chance of not living with both parents by the age of 15.
Cohabiting, which is to say unmarried, parents, according to the study, make up 19 per cent of all couples with dependent children, but account for half of all family breakdowns. A separate study by the Marriage Foundation in 2017 found that more than a third (36 per cent) of children whose parents had split up reported poor mental health, compared to only a fifth (22 per cent) with parents still together.
“There is a very clear link between family breakdown and children’s health,” Benson says. “The key factor is absent fathers, and absent fathers are much more likely in a cohabiting household because it’s more likely to split up.”
He says: “I would never talk disparagingly about lone-parent families.” His own mother was a lone parent.
“My interest in this is to help more couples stay together and I think this is the point of marriage, that it helps more couples stay together, so you avoid the heroism required to be a lone parent in providing all the resources of love and time and money on your own.”
‘People feel they have more choice’
The decline in marriage illustrates the seismic change in the nature of society over the last 50 years. Traditional sexual roles have changed; the pressures of social custom, convention and family expectations have largely receded (while still remaining very strong in some, more religiously inclined, cultures), along with the idea that one’s identity is contingent upon a union with somebody else.
“Put simply, people these days feel they have more choice,” says Ammanda Major, the head of clinical research at Relate, and a therapist dealing with relationships for 30 years. “And because people have more choices they are perhaps more likely to experiment. We have many people who now choose polyamory, or the variations of that; people who wish to be multi-partnered, whether emotionally, sexually or from an asexual perspective.”
The idea that if you don’t behave or conform to conventional social rules, ie marriage, that you will be thought less of – we have moved away from that.
The traditional pressure to hide certain desires or proclivities – the husband desperate to give polyamory a go to revive a flagging sex life or a woman who wants to enter a relationship with another woman but felt constrained by convention or fear of social disapproval – is vanishing fast.
“There are people who do not wish to enter into a marriage or civil partnership because they do not feel that is something that’s important to them,” Major adds, “and that’s fine. But just because people start off in a certain way not looking for exclusivity, that doesn’t mean that further down the line that is something they want to go forward with.”
The feeling of being cared for and connected to someone, she says, can have a significant impact on someone’s well-being. “There are people who would take a very different view on that – that’s just those people who are happy in relationships. But 30 years of therapy doesn’t lie. I appreciate people are coming to see me and my colleagues because there are problems.
“But people will talk about how they feel more content, more at one with themselves, when they feel they are in a relationship where someone is there for them, supportive of them, and where they can feel vulnerable in that relationship – and are not going to be taken advantage of.”
For Major, what this means in a relationship is commitment, whatever the agreed ‘rules’ of that commitment may be, and whether or not marriage is involved.
No ambiguity
For Benson, marriage is where commitment is most assured.
“The psychology behind marriage is incredibly compelling. When people decide to do something and make a commitment, they have an attitude and intent behind it.
“What you really want to make the relationship work is dedication – the desire to be a couple with a long-term future,” he says.
The vision of growing old together may be unfashionable for a younger generation brought up on the belief that they should always live in the moment and that anything inconvenient or difficult can easily be cast aside.
“That’s where deciding comes into it,” says Benson. “When you pop that question, will you spend the rest of your life with me, and the answer is yes, you’re very clearly making a decision; you’re removing ambiguity.
“And the wedding ceremony is very important too. The people there are affirming the risky choice you’ve made, and that social support is so much more obvious if you’ve stood up in public and made that choice, and they are also holding you to account.” He adds: “While it’s an unpopular view today, I suspect many people deep down still think it, if you want to bring up a child in a two-parent family, your best chance of doing that is by committing to marriage in the first place. But, on the whole, couples don’t commit as seriously, as intentionally, as they used to and therefore there is a lot more family breakdown.”
Benson speaks from personal experience. He has been married for 36 years and represents an organisation whose declared mission is to “advocate the advantages of marriage” and “demonstrate that marriage is both modern and the best arrangement for all couples”.
These are views that are being increasingly challenged, and as the statistics suggest even the reduced risk of diabetes may not be quite enough to sway people pondering on whether or not to tie the knot.
But married or not, the old adage still applies - a perfect relationship is just two imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other. But nobody ever said it was easy.