Fewer people are marrying. That’s cause for celebration, not state intervention
Nanny knows worst, English literature tells us, when she meddles in matters of the heart. If Juliet’s nurse and Wuthering Heights’ Nelly hadn’t freelanced quite so enthusiastically as relationship therapists, lives might have been saved and indeed lived happily ever after. Had Mrs Danvers thought to take a few deep breaths and detach herself from her late charge, Rebecca, some prime Cornish real estate might still be standing too.
It is a strange quirk of rightwing discourse that those who rail hardest against the “nanny state” tend also to worry most about “the marriage crisis” and suggest, Sebastian Flyte style, that nanny after all has the answer. Marriage is a social good, they say,– citing benefits to children and to health – and should be treated that way by the state, through tax incentives or other financial and cultural nudges. The starched and joyless figure who is not to interfere in our eating, drinking or smoking is suddenly to be given a free hand in one of life’s biggest decisions. Romantic decisions are just too important to be trusted to the couple in question.
Marriage is certainly in long decline in England and Wales. Last week, we heard that marriage rates are falling fast among young people in particular: 1.2 million more 25- to 35-year-olds were unmarried in 2021 than in 2011. Expect laments from those who consider the institution a “building block of society”. What is wrong with young people that they are not getting married?
But people’s romantic choices are their own business. These trends are not evidence of a crisis, but of revealed preferences. We no longer cattle-prod people into the institution and bar the doors. Social and financial pressures on singles have lessened. Perhaps this means fewer marriages. But perhaps that isn’t a problem.
Here are some measures that tend to succeed in boosting marriage. First, making divorce very hard to get. In the halcyon days of marriage, it was only men who could get divorced and only rich ones who could afford it. Later, women had to rigorously “prove” adultery if they wanted to end marriage on that basis. Until the late 1990s, the contributions of “homemakers” were not recognised by the divorce courts and stay-at-home spouses did not get much of a payout. This mostly disadvantaged women, incentivising them to put up with bad marriages. And it was only last year that “no fault divorce” was written into law, meaning couples could end their marriages without undue conflict. This, importantly, meant domestic abuse victims could walk away faster, having previously faced a two-year wait or the prospect of riling their already dangerous spouse with accusations.
Another effective way to bolster marriage is to heavily stigmatise single people and their children. The prospect of social disdain is highly motivating – vicious anti-spinster rhetoric and the social exclusion of “bastards” once propelled many a couple up the aisle.
Tax breaks and cash incentives can work too. In Hungary, married couples who promise to have three children can now get a £23,200 allowance towards a house – a scheme that has reversed the country’s downwards marriage trend. But is the prospect of cash the best foundation for a relationship? One would hope that these incentivised couples were really marrying for other reasons. But if so why give them money? Single people, especially parents, already suffer considerable financial penalties. For those who are single for good or unsolvable reasons, more discrimination does not help.
Marriage boosters tend to make the assumption that the institution is an unalloyed social good. But is it? One body of evidence suggests that married people live longer, healthier lives than the rest, another that this only applies to happy partnerships. Bad marriages can be seriously detrimental: frequent conflict, studies suggest, harms your health in all sorts of ways. And many still don’t walk away soon enough from bad relationships. One woman in four experiences domestic abuse in her lifetime. Money worries and the costs of divorce are still trapping people in loveless marriages.
True, there is some evidence that children benefit from marriage, but this becomes far muddier when the marriage is a bad one. It is certainly clear that children benefit from more parenting and more money, but not that trapping two people in a relationship is the only way for them to get it. If supporting children is the aim, we should perhaps think about increasing cohabitation rights or lessening parental stress by increasing access to childcare. Marriage is not the only answer.
And is marriage really a building block of society? Well, perhaps no longer. A few generations ago, marriage did have a close relationship with the community around it: a couple were defined by their wider social connections and extended family. But these days, married couples are viewed as primarily self-sufficient and autonomous. It is single people who tend to be far more connected to their communities: on average, they are more politically engaged, have more friends and provide more care to their siblings, parents and neighbours.
Marriage is declining – but it is not a crisis and certainly not one that calls for bustling intervention. Soaring levels of cohabitation among the young suggest instead that people are taking lifelong commitment seriously enough to give