Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 34

The patterns of relationships in our society are changing. It is easy to slip into grand generalizations when discussing this, so before reading on take a moment to think about the people around you. What kinds of story of singleness, of marriage, of living together, of divorce, of remarriage do you see? What shape is taken by the families you know – not in media representations and church reports, but amongst your own family, friends, and colleagues? Behind every statistic there are always real people – and every one of them has a story as complex as the people you know, driven by as many different factors. That complexity can get washed out when we focus on society-wide trends.

The statistics in the infographic on here–here illustrate some of the trends to which all those individual stories and decisions contribute. More people are living alone. Fewer are marrying, and those who do marry tend to marry later in life. As a result, ‘the proportions of men and women in recent years ever married by age 25 are the lowest on record over the last 100 years.’⁶² More people cohabit prior to, or instead of, marrying, to the extent that ‘marriage without first living together is now as unusual as premarital cohabitation was in the 1970s’.⁶³ Fewer children are being born to married couples. Divorce is beginning to become less common – not just in absolute terms, which you might expect given the smaller number of marriages, but proportionally: the lifetime risk of divorce for people who marry today is the lowest since 1969. The number of same-sex couples is growing, as is the proportion who have married. More children are being born and nurtured in families headed by couples of the same gender.

English society has never been uniform, but the spectrum of relationships visible in our society (and in all our media) does seem to be broader than ever before. There are wide variations in practice and expectation. No simple explanation covers the changes that have taken place. The story needs to include changes to marriage law; technological and medical changes affecting birth control and life expectancy; the emancipation of women, which has brought with it educational and professional opportunities and new possibilities of financial and legal independence; the evolution of the welfare state and changes to tax regimes; altered distributions of wealth and changing patterns of employment; shifts in immigration; growing awareness of domestic abuse and the need to escape it; changing patterns of religious commitment; changes to the kinds of behaviour that get stigmatized; changes to the ways in which human fulfilment tends to be imagined; and changes to people’s attitudes to a wide variety of institutions. There is no one story to tell – no simple narrative of progress or decline.