Get Hitched! You Can Take or Leave the Monogamy
Or don’t – but don’t let anyone tell you it's pointless.
I was married last year in a very beautiful church in the very beautiful Basque city of San Sebastián, and if the rain dampened our guests, it didn’t dampen the mood. It is possible that this is because most of them came out early to Spain and spent the days before our wedding feasting on pintxos and drinking enough red wine to shock a Belgian monk. But I would like to think it is because of the amusing priest who officiated things, the delectable txuleta steak we served, and the genuine hilarity of the best man’s speech.
All this will no doubt seem quaint to a certain sort of person for whom marriage is at best redundant or at worst, a sort of patriarchal relic of our grim common past, and—which is more horrifying still—something presided over by a soldier of a criminal church. For this person, marriage is ‘just a piece of paper’: a contract clothed in the mantle of something more meaningful in a futile attempt to ennoble it. But is this true? And if not, why?
Well no, it isn’t true. In my view, such a belief belongs to what the late philosopher Mary Midgeley called the school of ‘nothing buttery’. According to this school — and here I am quoting Roger Scruton — ‘the human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on canvas, the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre.’ And so on. This reductionist view denies meaning of any kind, claiming only to deal with the hard facts of life. Love, on this view, is ‘nothing but’ a series of chemical reactions in the brain.
This reductionist view denies meaning of any kind, claiming only to deal with the hard facts of life.
To quote Madame de Sévigné, ‘If you don’t understand, I shall not be able to explain it to you.’ There is very little we can say to those who take such a nihilistic view of things. Marriage, at any rate, is not ‘nothing but’ a piece of paper. It is not even ‘nothing but’ a contract. It is, on the one hand, a vow, firmed up and sanctified by a spot of ritual and ceremony; and, on the other, a structure in which children can grow up feeling safe. And there is a point to the whole song and dance of the wedding itself as well: it elevates a private statement into both a public promise and a symbol of the community’s will to endure.
If marriage were a ‘contract’, as some (including the conspicuously asexual Immanuel Kant) have claimed, it of a peculiar sort, since it aims by its nature to transcend the very notion of a contract. What you might call its ‘terms’ involves the dissolution of the gap between the two parties involved, in order that they may join together indefinitely. The reason marriage has historically involved all sorts of moral and legal and religious prohibitions is because it is not a contract, but a vow, and vows by their nature do not have terms and cannot be broken; they are, at least in theory, forever. If a marriage did not involve this commit to joining together—that is, literally, marrying—then it would not be a marriage. It would be something else, which is fine. But it would not be a marriage.
But onto the practical. That marriage provides structure for children is no small thing. Family structure, as Sophia Worringer of the Centre for Social Justice has shown, has a bigger impact than education or earnings on the physical and mental health of children, how well they do at school, and how the extent to which they develop socially and emotionally. You may say that you don’t have to be married to provide that structure, and you would be right. But it helps — a lot. The child of parents who live together but are not married is, as the CSJ also points out, ‘more than twice as likely to experience parental separation’; and, controlling for income, research has found that 88 per cent of married couples were still together when their child was aged five, compared to 67 per cent of those who were cohabiting. Children who grow up without a father at home — which is more likely than growing up without a mother at home, let’s face it — are more likely to end up in jail (in the case of boys) and get pregnant while still a teenager (in the case of girls), neither of which is ideal.
The child of parents who live together but are not married is, as the CSJ also points out, ‘more than twice as likely to experience parental separation’.
Marriage as an institution is of course more robust when it is tricky to get un-married. Marriage took a hit when the government introduced no-fault divorce in spring 2022. Now, you only have to be married for a year before you can untie the knot, which sets the bar rather low. This is not great for the kids, either: incredibly, children suffer more from the divorce of their parents than the death of one. In 2004, University College Dublin found that compared to other children, the children of divorced parents were more likely to be depressed, do worse at school, and have poor social skills, among other unhappy outcomes. The Longevity Project, an eight-decade study into health and long life, found that parental divorce was the biggest social predictor of an early death.
Then there are the outcomes for the two parties in the event of a split, which is much more likely for unmarried couples. Unsurprisingly, newly single women (in the case of straight relationships) are landed with the bulk of the responsibilities. And not only this: according to the campaign group Gingerbread, less than two-thirds of non-resident parents in the UK, the vast bulk of whom are men, pay what they owe the mother of their child and the child himself.
So deciding not to get married isn’t ideal if you are planning to have kids. Getting married and divorcing also causes problems. That, at least, is what the evidence suggests, even as marriage fast falls out of fashion. If people choose not to get married, that is, of course, up to them. Moreover, marriage does not always work out. Often it should not work out: there are those who get trapped in violent relationships and need to escape (though domestic abuse is far more likely in cohabiting relationships than married ones). But clearly, marriage is not ‘just a piece of paper’.
