It’s good news that we’re choosing to grow up later

Ialways marvel when reading magazines from the Seventies, which I often do for research, at how young people were when they moved into life’s serious phase. Women in their mid-twenties regularly wrote in about the strains and pleasures – but mostly the strains – of life as a married mother of three.

Today, when it comes to reaching the benchmarks of adulthood, we have slowed right down, according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). We are having children later, getting married later (or not at all), getting divorced later, and becoming grandparents later.

It’s tempting to feed this data into a narrative of bad news: today’s adults live in eternal childhood; modernity has produced cosseted, self-absorbed ditherers ill-equipped to dive into the duties of life’s bread and butter.

But in fact it’s brilliant that we’ve slowed our roll. Most of us can count on a longer life than our forebears so we do, generally, have more time.

Crucially, the fact that we no longer have to marry our high-school sweethearts and make a family with them is a good thing.

It means that when we do get to putting a ring on it, we have thought long and hard about the decision to do so, tested the waters, and can rest assured we’re making the best possible choice at the time.

We change a huge amount between the ages of 21 and 31, or indeed 41, and marrying someone when one is barely out of one’s teens means that the marriage will have to accommodate violent growing pains.

Often it can’t, which is why the Seventies, the decade following the liberalisation of divorce, saw a tripling in the rate of marital splits.

Taking our time is paying off in longer marriages: the age of divorce has risen to 46.9 for men and 44.5 for women, up from 40.4 and 37.9 two decades ago, according to the ONS figures.

The way we now approach matters of serious commitment – as connoisseurs of selfknowledge – reflects a happy extension of economic liberalism.

Choice – increasingly enshrined in the British marketplace since the Seventies (the first Mcdonald’s arrived here in 1974) – was given a stick of dynamite up the backside once Mrs Thatcher became prime minister in 1979.

The deregulation of our financial markets in 1986 was the crowning glory in a decade of entrepreneurialism and business: as the historian Frank Mort has noted, under chancellor Nigel Lawson, “consumption became a whole way of life”.

The logics and luxuries of choice seeped into everything, including how we date and love, buttressed by a landscape in which sex, love, marriage, reproduction and experimentation could all be separated out. More recently, online dating, for all its horrors, has offered even more choice and control.

Although it can make us picky, exploiting choice has given us better and happier relationships. It is precisely through dating lots of people, and through careful attention to one’s own needs, proclivities, foibles and weaknesses, that one refines one’s offering. Mature, experienced people make better partners – and parents.

Previous generations may have grown up and got on with life faster, but the costs of this could be very high indeed – as those desperate letters of young married mothers made all too plain.