What every couple needs to know
As the Queen and Duke celebrate their platinum anniversary, Rosa Silverman looks at the ingredients of a long-lasting union
Theirs was a love match. When Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, 70 years ago today, no degree of formality, royal protocol or decorum could conceal that she did so for the most romantic of reasons. Their regard for one another is evident in those early photographs, her eyes gazing into his; two people on the threshold of a lifetime of service, during which their marriage would be tested like few others are.
Yet despite the extraordinary nature of their existence, living out their years in the full glare of public scrutiny, their union has endured. And to tease out the secret to its success, we must look first to what brought the pair together: their love, “an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken,” as Shakespeare put it in Sonnet 116.
In a letter to the princess before their marriage, Philip declared himself “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly”. Elizabeth, for her part, was described as looking “flushed and radiant with happiness” at their first joint public appearance, noted Philip Eade in his biography of the young duke.
But if love is necessary to carry a couple through seven decades of marriage, it is certainly not sufficient. Especially not today, when we marry later, meaning even the most perfect of unions will be thwarted by mortality before it can reach the 70-year mark.
In 1947 – the year the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh married – the average age of marriage was 26 years and seven months for men. For women it was just 24. The Queen, in fact, was 21 on her wedding day, while Philip was 26.
Fast-forward to 2014 – the most recent year for which ONS figures are available – and the average age of marriage was 33 years and six months for men, while for women it was 31 years and three months.
Shifting social attitudes are behind this trend, says Harry Benson, the director of research at the Marriage Foundation. “It used to be that marriage was the foundation upon which you built your life adventure together,” he says. “You’d get married, then figure out how you were going to make it all work. Today, people tend to see it as something to do when you’ve achieved, when you’ve established your career and already thought about or had children. It’s the roof rather than the foundation. It’s the thing you do once you’ve got all your ducks in a row.”
It was the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill from the Sixties and Seventies onwards that broke the link between sex, commitment and marriage, he notes. When introduced in 1961, the Pill was for married women only, but uptake quickly soared and its use became synonymous with the “free love” movement of those decades.
More broadly speaking, once birth control had freed women from the risk of getting pregnant out of wedlock – and, later, the taboo of illegitimacy slowly eroded, too – there was less incentive for marrying so early in life.
Then, of course, came what Benson terms “the divorce revolution”. As the social stigma of ending a marriage diminished, no longer did couples have to grin and bear an unhappy union: bailing out became acceptable, and an exit route was clearly marked for those who might otherwise have felt compelled to stick it out to the bitter end.
As a result, by the start of this decade, ONS figures showed that one in three marriages were ending before they even reached the 15-year mark. The marriage of the Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales officially ended just one month past this point. The Duke of York and Sarah Ferguson were divorced within 10 years. The Princess Royal’s first marriage, to Mark Phillips, lasted longer – more than 18 years – and she will celebrate the 25th anniversary of her second, to Sir Tim Laurence, next month. But the Earl of Wessex is the only one of the Queen and Duke’s four children to still be with his first spouse: he and Sophie, Countess of Wessex have now been married for 18 years and counting. However, given that he was 35 when he wed, he may have difficulty matching his parents’ example.
Although there was a small increase in the number of divorces last year, rates are more than 20per cent lower than the peak in 2003-04, something experts attribute to the rising popularity of cohabitation and the increasing age at first marriage – meaning couples have longer to carefully think through a commitment before making it.
Benson remains optimistic about the potential for long-lasting marriages today: “People still want reliable love and the best way to achieve it is to make a promise to stay together for life. That’s unlikely ever to change; it’s hard-wired into our human nature,” he says. Still, it’s one thing to declare your union will endure “till death do us part”. It’s quite another to put that into practice, as the steady rise in “silver splitters” (those divorcing over 65) shows.
Conventional wisdom tells us marriage is something you have to work at; that it requires compromise, patience and forgiveness, all of which are a far cry from the initial throes of passion that might first bring a couple together. But apart from these truisms, what lessons might we learn from those who have succeeded in going the distance, about how we can make our own matches last?
Olive and Fred Connington, from Headcorn in Kent, will celebrate their 72nd wedding anniversary this week, having married in 1945, just after the war ended, when she was 18 and he 21. For Olive, now 90, the key to their endurance is simple: shared interests. “We did everything together,” she says. “Outside of work, we did Rotary and a lot of charity work together. We were also both interested in the art world and did a lot of drawing and painting and belonged to art clubs.”
“And we started up a PTA group in our daughters’ school,” adds Fred, 95. We’ve always got out and done things and were always in the thick of it. You have to get outside yourself, which is what we did. So our existence is not limited to each other, by any means.”
As Oscar Wilde said, “Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.” And it stands to reason that the more you share in common, the more you’ll have to talk about.
Any marriage, of course, will go through rocky patches. But it’s how you deal with these that count, say the Conningtons. “You always have your little tiffs but they don’t last,” says Olive. “You make up and carry on.”
Carrying on, of course, is something at which the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have excelled. Their lives may have been atypical, but the secrets to their long-lasting union are nonetheless relevant to the rest of us.
On their golden wedding anniversary in 1997, the Queen explained just what Philip has meant to her during her reign, declaring: “He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years.”
The remark touches on another key ingredient: the emotional as well as practical support each partner must give the other, so crucial in enabling them to go through life as a team. As Gyles Brandreth noted in his book Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage: “They are different people. Yet they understand one another. Completely. And they are allies.”
Philip shared the “main lesson” they had learnt, when they reached the 50-year mark, that might also be universally applied: “Tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage. It may not be quite so important when things are going well, but it is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult. You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.”
But it is perhaps the Duke of Cambridge who hit on the most life-affirming explanation for his grandparents’ enduring love. “He makes her laugh,” he said in 2012. “Together they’re a great couple.”
‘Today, marriage is the thing you do once you’ve got all your ducks in a row’
‘They are different people. Yet they understand one another. And they are allies’