Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 37

There remains a very high level of expectation placed on marriage and other long-term relationships. In May 2019, Radio 4’s Analysis devoted a programme to Love Island. The presenter, Shahidha Bari, talked about the culture of sexual encounter in Britain today. ‘Love Island dramatizes love as a market place,’ she said.⁶⁶ The programme suggested that, for most participants in this market place, the end to which sexual activity tends is ‘self-fulfilment’.

Multiple sexual encounters are seen as a necessary, even sometimes an irksome, means towards that end. People are seeking the holy grail: a person truly worthy of becoming their permanent romantic partner – and they expect to take time to find the right person.⁶⁷

For many, there is an aspiration that, having found the right person, marriage will, sooner or later, follow. The anthropologist Helen Fisher told Bari that modern dating behaviour was in effect a prudent ‘extension of the pre-commitment stage of partnerships.’ Permanent union is not out of fashion, she explains, but marriage is not now seen as the beginning of a long exploration of commitment. Instead, it is the possible end of a long period of research and experimentation.

Who wants to be married, and how and where?

A large survey undertaken in 2003 tells us that

• monogamous marriage was a current ‘relationship ideal’ for a little under half the population, though women were keener (48.5% against men’s 40.9%);

• a further 21% said they would like a permanent monogamous partner but wished to live independently;

• a further 18% said they would opt for monogamous cohabitation; and

• when asked what their ideal relationship for five years’ time would be, two-thirds said they wanted to be ‘married with no other partners’ (62.5% of men, 69.3% of women), and another fifth chose ‘cohabiting with no other partners’ (20.4% of men, 18.0% of women).⁶⁸

More recently, in 2017, when the Church of England Life Events team asked 1,000 unmarried 18- to 35-year-olds whether they planned to get married in the future, 72% said yes.⁶⁹ The number of people hoping for a permanent monogamous relationship remains high.

Following the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act in 2013, same-sex couples were able to marry from 29 March 2014 onwards; same-sex couples who had been in a civil partnership were able to convert their partnership into a marriage from 10 December 2014. On 31 December 2019, heterosexual couples were granted the same rights to enter civil partnerships and to convert these into a marriage.

• In the nine months of 2014 when same-sex marriage was legal, 4,850 couples were married. In the three weeks at the end of that year when it became possible, a further 2,411 couples converted their civil partnerships into marriages.⁷⁰

• In 2015, 6,493 same-sex couples were married; 9,156 couples converted their civil partnerships into marriages.⁷¹

• In 2016 (the most recent year for which full statistics have been published), 7,019 same-sex couples were married; 1,663 couples converted their civil partnerships into marriages.⁷²

• By 2019 there were 212,000 married same-sex couples in the UK, having increased by 40% since 2015.⁷³

The number of weddings taking place in church has dropped.

• In 2017, less than a quarter of all marriages were religious ceremonies, having fallen from less than a half in the late 1970s.⁷⁴ The fastest growing choice of venue for civil marriages is in ‘approved premises’ like hotels and country houses: in 2015, 89% of opposite-sex couple and 88% of same-sex couples married in approved premises.⁷⁵ Weddings in holiday settings are increasingly popular.

• The number of weddings taking place in the Church of England has fallen by 27% from 2007 to 2017. In 2018, there were 35,000 Church of England marriages (none of them for same-sex couples) and 2,500 services of prayer and dedication after civil marriages in 2018, down from 38,000 and 3,000 respectively in 2017.⁷⁶

If marriage is indeed now seen as the end rather than the start of commitment, a great deal is being asked of it. It is looked to for romantic permanence, and as the place where the needs of the self may be met by its soulmate. ‘It’s not that we don’t believe in love anymore, but that love means everything’, claimed Bari. ‘This is why the modern couple fails’, agreed the philosopher Pascal Bruckner. ‘It is like an overloaded boat that sinks under its own weight.’

This idea of marriage as the end of a search for the true romantic partner goes deep in our culture. It is the basic plot, for instance, of the classic novel – one of the most influential genres in modern history, with a mass of other narrative forms growing from it in film and TV, from sitcoms to romcoms. Yet this idea sets the bar for a successful marriage extremely high, and the result is often a never-ending quest: a pattern of serial monogamy in which each partner in turn fails to match the ideal.

We should be careful not to caricature people’s reasons for marrying, however. One recent study indicated that those reasons can include a desire to comply with convention (especially religious and parental expectations); to express and celebrate publicly an already formed relationship; to confirm commitment to a relationship now understood to be permanent; to set up ‘a framework within which a process of deepening commitment would take place’, especially as a context for raising children; or for financial reasons or reasons related to immigration.⁷⁷

For many in our society, marriage holds out an attractive promise of security, intimacy, and mutual care, legally protected and culturally valued. Data repeatedly show it to be the most positive context for the flourishing of children, although there is debate about how much of this is due to the parents being married and how much to other factors.⁷⁸ It is not surprising to find groups who have in the past been excluded from marriage longing for its benefits, or simply longing to live in a society where they are not automatically excluded from a widely valued ideal.