Till death do us part? Marriage won’t be for life if we live till 120

MARRIAGE vows may need to be rewritten to omit “till death do us part” because people are living so long that couples may not want to be together for life, a leading academic warned.

Sarah Harper, Professor of Gerontology at Oxford University, said the increase in life expectancy, coupled with scientific and medical advances, would see people not dying before 120 or 130.

Current general life expectancy is rising two and a half years per decade, or 15 minutes an hour, she told the Hay Festival, meaning every day the average person in Britain adds six hours to their lifespan.

But she said the huge increase in longevity would bring challenges for marriage because partners who were previously wed for a few decades could find themselves hitched for a century.

“The 21st century is going to see a dramatic increase in life expectancy, not only of individuals but of the whole population. We need to re-evaluate ageing and take on board what these

‘We need to re-evaluate ageing and take on board what these very, very long lives will mean’

very, very long lives will mean,” Prof Harper, a married mother of three, told the Hay audience.

She said: “The historian Michael Anderson has pointed out that in our country, as widowhood started to the decline as the main cause for the breakup of marriage, so divorce started to increase and in fact they mirror each other.

“One of the arguments he makes at the end of his paper is maybe we have to look, with these very, very long lives, whether we do want to be together for 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years.

“So even the institution of marriage I think we’ve got to look at. We’ve pushed back death considerably.”

Figures from the Office for National Statistics forecast that half all the babies born in the UK today will live to 104.

But the gains in longevity are causing severe problems because many will see retirement last far longer than their working lives, placing a huge burden on pensions and completely altering the definition of old age, said Prof Harper, who is also director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing.