The story of marriage’s declining fortunes has been gathering momentum for a while now. Divorce is commonplace, romcoms keep disappointing, and according to the 2021 census, the majority of adults in the UK are choosing, for the first time since records began, not to get married at all.
Having rejected an institution that has been a bastion of privilege for some, and a source of inequality and injustice for others, lots of people are experimenting with alternatives to the norms and expectations of matrimony, monogamy and family.
The real question, then, isn’t why so many people aren’t marrying – although there has a been a lot of hand-wringing over the fallout from women’s financial independence and changing practices around cohabitation and child rearing.
But it’s more interesting to consider why lots of other people – including liberal, secular, queer and divorced people – are still choosing to get married. What explains this ongoing attachment to the world’s oldest framework for union?
Puzzling over this while researching my book On Marriage, I asked a bunch of spouses what had motivated them to tie their knots. Bizarrely for such a consequential decision, most appeared genuinely flummoxed by my question, offering me hunches rather than answers. Erm, security? Children? Taxes? Stability? Peer pressure? Love?
Those who had long maintained a critical stance towards an institution they viewed as intrinsically patriarchal, yet had still wound up inside it, tended to offer me excuses. They did it for their parents, work, visas, kids, money, convenience. Who doesn’t want an excuse for a big party?
Marriage turned out to be a weird topic of conversation. On the one hand, it was a theme so hackneyed as to provoke eyerolls and yawns. On the other, its mere mention appeared to be triggering.
While everybody implied they knew what they thought about it, most sounded like they hadn’t really thought about it. Many who had committed themselves to marriage appeared to have wandered into their married lives more or less absent-mindedly.
Perhaps there’s no other way. Marriage, after all, is an extraordinary proposal: a commitment, made before witnesses, to stick with somebody until death. Who fully comprehends such an act in advance?
It’s especially strange in a predominantly secular society. Until the late 20th century, marriage in the UK was mostly undertaken to fulfil a sacred covenant, receive God’s blessing, and reflect a divine relationship.
But in 1992, civil ceremonies overtook religious ones. Today in the UK, six in ten people aged 16 to 34 identify with no religion, according to the latest British Social Attitudes survey. Yet religion doesn’t seem to have been entirely withdrawn from the institution either.
I was once granted a licence in the US state of Massachusetts to become a “one-day solemniser”. I temporarily had the power to officiate at the wedding of two people, neither of whom wanted a religious ceremony. “Solemnising” – meaning to perform or celebrate an official ceremony – seemed a suitably neutral word.
However, the ceremony did not feel altogether unreligious – perhaps because marriage is a place where modern secular culture has quietly absorbed many of the dreams and values we associate with religion.
Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death that without God, many seek meaning, salvation and sanctuary in romance. So you might say we can see this in the language around marriage. Oaths become “vows”, faith becomes “fidelity”, eternity becomes “forever”. The afterlife becomes the “happy ever after”.
Indeed, facing the perilous future that lies before us today, it’s little wonder if people cling to an institution promising love, commitment and salvation for the long term – even if they’ve no particular interest in what marriage meant to their grandparents.
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