Why it's best to tie the knot

Marriage works. It keeps relationships together and children benefit hugely from stable two parent families. The evidence is overwhelming. I've never seen it seriously disputed.

It is a serious sociological observation, not a right-wing cliché. Indeed, the first time I was introduced to the idea was an article, Dan Quayle was Right by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, originally printed in The Atlantic Monthly. I was given it by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the intellectual driver of the Clinton-Blair third way.

But it still leaves two questions. Why does it work? And can Government do anything to promote it? I think the answers are linked.

The reason why married couples stay together longer than cohabiting ones is not a mystery. Marriage makes use of a very strong principle of social psychology - that humans strive very hard to remain consistent to their commitments. Robert Cialdini deals with this in one section of his unmissable book Influence.

Marriage works for the same reason that Weight Watchers get you to announce your goals in public and weigh yourself in public, and for the same reason that the Chinese insisted that prisoners of war write their confessions down. Once a commitment is made publicly, even in front of a few people, it becomes much harder to escape from.

Understanding that marriage works through social psychology is important when considering policy.

The suggestion that tax breaks might encourage marriage seems laughable. One Brown spin doctor when asked why he cohabited replied "I would have married, but Gordon abolished the married couple's allowance". Yet this laughter is inspired by a misconception about the tax policy - that the idea is to pay people a small sum to wed. How could the sum ever be big enough for that, scoff the critics.

They've missed the point. The idea is to establish that marriage is a social norm, once again. That it is socially approved of and looked on with favour. Just as they work hard to be consistent, people tend to conform to social norms. Quite a small sum could prove powerful.

Comments

[James Kennett]

State financial support for marriage over cohabitation may be slight, but for single-parent status over either marriage or cohabitation it is huge. A recent article by Frank Field in the Sunday Times [1] pointed this out.

The same bias appears if you apply for council housing. If you are a two-parent working family, basically you can forget it - even though in London you may find private rented accommodation too expensive, and mortgage repayments impossible.

[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2042238.ece

[Daphne Millar]

Indeed marriage is a very good thing. So good that Rupert Murdoch has done it three times.

[James Hannam]

There is a fly in the marriage panacea ointment. A good part of the reason people stay married is because their natural parents did. Like so much else, it is genetic. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker presents compelling evidence that propensity to divorce is at least 50% inheritable. Now, the other 50% may be down to the social psychology, but any attempt to modify human behaviour that takes no account of genetics is unlikely to be effective.

The reason for this is that many of the ‘benefits’ of having two married parents are due to having the genes of people who are good at long-term commitments and have no relationship-destroying character flaws. If your natural father dies and your mother brings you up on her own, your life chances are much the same as if your parents had both survived and stayed married. But if your parents get divorced, then your life chances are significantly reduced. So, it’s not having a single parent that screws you up, it’s having the genes of parents who can’t maintain a relationship.

Obviously, this is all a bit unpalatable and also means there isn’t a lot we can do to improve life chances by strengthening marriage. But I’m married and would definitely vote Tory for an extra grand a year. Perhaps that’s the point.

[William McIlhagga]

You miss another possibility: that marriage works because the people who marry are, on average, slightly different (either intrinsically, or by reason of circumstance) from those who don't.

[Joseph Francis]

"It is a serious sociological observation, not a right-wing cliché."

I rather doubt that, but anyway, is it really sensible for the Tories to be banging such a traditional party drum?

I've noticed a few such rightward movements from Cameron over the past few weeks. Is he getting worried about holding the party together? Remember, he'll never win a majority playing to his base.

Which is exactly what this "issue" looks like.

[Andy]

So genetic determinism rears its head again. I'm not going to argue for or against the "compelling evidence", unlike a lot of posters I try not to make sweeping claims on things I don't know a lot about. But what I can say is that if something is 50% genetic, we need to work all the harder on the other 50%, because Nazi style eugenics would seem to be the way the alternative road leads.

[peter clinton]

Of course marriage works, mostly. But when it doesn't, the consequences are disastrous for the couple, for the children, and for the family finances.
the laughers are the lawyers

[Tim]

Daniel is right: it is not the cash bt what society says that is important. The evidence that having no positive male role model is detrimental to male children. but society views feckless fathers as acceptable. We cannot have it both ways - if we want permissiveness, a lack of social pressure to marry and stay married, women having children by different fathers who are never around and so on - then we must accept the social consequences. Alterntaively, if we want to avoid the cosnequences of family breakdown, we must promote the family even if that means we say that one "lifestyle choice" is actually better than others.

[Phil Corfan]

Could it not be that married couples are more stable because the kind of couples that choose to get married are more stable to start with? Getting married might be a symptom of the stability rather than the cause.

[Rog]

To Mr James Hannam.

You wrote:

If your natural father dies and your mother brings you up on her own, your life chances are much the same as if your parents had both survived and stayed married.

Then, what do you define about the case that a widower gets married within 2 years since he/she lost his/her spouse? What is the prospects for the children of such widower? Would it be similar to the case of divorce consequence??

I would like to know your opinion.

[Starling]

EXACTLY, Phil. You hit the nail right on the head. The reason people are/stay married is because everything is right. But marriage doesn't make things right if they're wrong. That's complete fairy tale thinking.

[Malcolm McLean]

I read in the Times that a single mother can get £23,000 for doing a 16 hour week on the minimum wage, if all benefits are totted up. Whilst that is probably a cherry-pick, it is more than many people get for fulltime jobs they have worked hard to qualify for. The free money to support womens' lifestyle choices needs to stop.

[Kelly]

I certainly agree that marriage is a useful and productive thing for society. One thing I believe would help lessen the levels of divorce is actual pre-marital training. No one speaks cogently about the challenges a couple face once the love-fest of the first few years has worn off. Communication training, realistic expecations, and examples of great marriages need to be encouraged before anyone steps up to the alter, regardless of their genetic makeup....

[David Morrison]

Marriage is a wonderful institution for women but not for men. The financial penalty of a failed marriage is so severe that the wealthy never should marry.
Today it is not necessary for a woman to marry to be a mother. Men however cannot be fathers without a woman's consent. Further even when a divorce happened 30 years before
and the ex-wife has squandered her
settlement she can have another
settlement from her former husband
as has been recently reported.
To improve marriage statistics improve divorce laws.

[Nick]

Am I the only person to note a total lack of any evidence being offered for this argument? Please, give us some actual reason to take you seriously! And should we assume that gay marriage is better than gay cohabitation?

[Peter Richardson]

Governments, that is politics, are always trying to take credit for someone else's work. Marriages that do work are because the people that are in them make them work. Marriage is as old as time and I doubt anyone really knows why, ask five people and there will probably be ten different answers. It is a very individual and a very personal relationship, and cannot be bureaucracised, one size does not fit all. Throwing money at it will not make it any different one way or another, and since when was money a universal panacea for everything?
The technology evolution of the last sixty years has had a tremendous social impact, a very real upheaval in how people used to live. More changes than have ever occurred at any other time in all of human history, almost over night, relatively speaking. Humans are a very adaptable specie, but adaptation takes time and that does'nt happen overnight. In any event marriage will always be there for those who want it, regardless of any outside interferences.

[csc]

I've talked to a lot of married men, and if you get the real inside story from a lot of seemingly stable marriages, you'll see that there is a lot of suffering and fraud going on i marriages and by men. Many marriages seem to turn into a cold war, where sex mostly disappears, leaving the men searching for outside sources for it, and the wives pretending to ignore it, all the while putting up a good front for friends and family. It seems to me a sad state of affairs, but they agree to stay together for the kids. I don't really know how this is healthy, but I suppose it's no worse than the alternatives.

[Andrew Milner]

Marriage? All for it. When you fly the UK coop to seek your fortune in the Colonies, a foreign-born spouse (for you and her) really smoothes out those visa problems and provides a ready-made support group while you get to grips with the language. Because there is no fudging with "Marital Status" on the visa application. So part your strategic planning should be, "love her, love her country." And fortunately “English gentleman” (generic) is flavour of the month in most of Asia. But forget Bangkok bargirls unless you are some kind of masochist. I mean marrying one, naturally. Wise counselling that is all too frequently ignored.

[Carroll]

Currently the tax and benefit system is biased against married couples. Rather than the supporters of marriage being made to explain their proposals, it should be those who have undermined marriage who should be made to justify this anti-marriage bias. They can't: the evidence is against them so they rely on hysterical claims about not wanting to be judgmental (often from those who are very judgmental about trivial matters), when the best way of bringing up children is exactly the sort of thing we should be judgmental about as a society. Ask children themselves what they want and they'll tell you that they want Mum and Dad together loving them and each other. But there are no adults so deaf as those that don't want to hear.

[Ian Brown]

The confusion of causation with correlation in the marriage debate is quite astonishing.

[GARTH REX]

MAKE THEM SWEAR!

A very interesting and insightful article! Daniel make some good points.

Perhaps his "Priciple of Public Commitment" could be applied to the field of politics.

We could make politicians publicly vow, pledge and swear, at the start of their terms, among other things, to be honest, truthful, and to always serve the public's interests!

[DavidN]

Well - yes - Pat and I have been together for 35 years (we must be old fogies). And 2 children to prove it!

But we did not go through the marriage thing - her family would not accept anything but the full marriage thing - her lot are Catholics - I don't want to do that!

We are happy.
Our children are doing Ok.

[Julianne Wiley]

Yes it's true that it's the more stable, successful and responsible people who tend to get married to begin with; on the other hand, marriage helps make people more stable, successful and responsible. So it's not a one-way causal phenomenon, but a mutually-reinforcing phenomenon. Capable, faithful people are more likely to marry; marriage encourages people to be more capable and faithful.

[Mother at Large]

Has marriage stopped being a social norm? Not round my way.

Marriage is successful partly because it's a mechanism that gives a couple wider support in varying forms from the wider community of friends, family, religious groupings, neighbours.

To me, co-habiting says you're keeping your options open in case a better offer comes along.

And yes, of course, after standing up in a church full of people to make my vows to my groom, I work harder to be forgiving and tolerant of my husband's foibles (as he does of mine) than I have ever done in any relationship before or since.

[Marilyn]

There is much confusion about this marriage business. But surely the thing is to recognise that you need transferable tax allowances(or income splitting - like they have in other countries) for couples with children -ie in recognition of the fact that there are children to raise and two adults to support/feed/clothe/house on just one income (or one and a half incomes) when previously there were two whole incomes.
When children come into a marriage the living costs soar at the same time as income diminishes when one parent inevitably adjusts his/her working commitments to care for the children. Parenting children (best done by committed couples if at all possible) takes time and huge amounts of money. The value of what parents do to raise the next generation is what needs to be recognised in the taxation system. At present it's possible that two working adults in a household with NO children to raise could be paying LESS tax than the couple next door with three children on the same household income!!! (Because the first couple benefit from two single person's allowances) . Surely this can't be fair?

[Shona]

I think Labour missed a trick with the Civil Partnership here. In France anyone can have a civil partnership, and it confers most of the benefits tax, inheritance, responsibilities tant marriage does, but it is very open-ended. But it doesn't have the "heavy" connotations marriage does.

The French system is very good on this, parents have an extra "half part for each kid, but married or pacsed ones get tax relief. Many couples still cohabit, foregoing the tax break, but many end up going in front of M. le Maire. Human inertia does the rest.

People forget that this is about children, not parents. I don't understand, if you don't want to marry him or he doesn't want to marry you, that is make a life-long or longterm commitment to you and your offspring, why are you having a child with this person? The assumption must be because it doesn't matter if he abandons the kids. Well it does matter, children need both parents.

Children are for life, not just for a one night stand.

[widow]

There is another aspect of the problem.
I am a widowed mother, educated to a postgraduate level, however it so happened that my career was secondary to my husband's (my choice - he was more talented). So now after his death I am unable either to find highly paid job or to work full time as I have no one to help me.
The only support my family gets from the state after my husband's death is 2K a year, which is then being taxed through my salary.
We all know that any tax break should be financed somehow. Do you think it is reasonable to give tax breaks to married couples thus de facto taking additional money from my two children?
And by the way - Can someone explain why the term "a single parent" is always used as a euphemism for a low-income/non-working parent?

[DH]

The person who pointed out that cause and correlation are being confused hit the nail on the head. I'm fairly sure I could collect some statistics showing that children called Jessica or Tarquin tend to do better in life than the "average" child. Is this because their name gives them some magic powers? Or is it because children called Jessica or Tarquin tend to have "nice, middle class parents"? (I'm not trying to start a class war here, just illustrating a point). Perhaps the Conservative party should instead propose tax allowances for parents who call their sons Tarquin? If not, why not?

The important thing is not whether you have a valid marriage certificate, it is that you provide a stable, loving environment for your children, and are committed to making your relationship and the family unit work. In the past if you were that kind of couple you tended to get married. The statement "stable loving relationship tends to lead to marriage" is not the same as the statement "marriage tends to lead to stable loving relationship". A implies B does not mean B implies A. Think about it.

[Graeme]

"the legal union of a man and a woman in order to live together and often to have children" is what my Oxford states. Sally and I have been trying to have children for 9 years. It's called pre-marital sex of which many must be familiar. For some unexplicable position our residing Singapore Dept. of Health denies unmarried couples IVF. If my home government has finally removed married couples tax breaks then I take my hat off to my fellow Scot for bringing about equality.

[James Hannam]

Hi Rog,

Sorry for the delay in replying. I'd imagine the scenario you mention would not make much difference to the children's outcomes but without figures for each particular permutation, it is hard to be sure.

[David Reid]

So married people stay together longer than co-habiters. Why does no one mention that it is likely that the sort of people who are most likely to stay together for longer are the sort of people who are most likely to get married. I value freedom and personal autonomy and potential. I feel it is arrogant for me to assume my partner will want to live with me for the rest of their life and vice versa. In a purely practical way we may fall out of love or our circumstances may change. This is one of the reasons I am reluctant to marry. Our relationship is probably more likely to end at some time in the future than those who feel absoloutely sure that they will be together for life. (although I must ad we have been together unmarried for 14 years). My point is that it may not be marriage that keeps people together but the sort of people they are which makes them more likely to marry!

[Bob]

Tim mentioned the consequences of a "permissive society".

I have no problem with permissive society, it means that pepole are free to make their own choices in life without petty judgement. The thing is that all choices have consequences and I do have a problem with financially supporting pepole who use their freedom to quite deliberately, and sometimes repeatedly, make bad choices.

Becoming a single parent can be a choice but it is a hard choice and one with many consequences. I don't see why the state should support people who choose to make this decision at the expense of people who choose a more sustainable option. Social security should not be a license for private recklessness.

With this in mind it is not necessary to elevate support for married couples above other groups but it is important to equalise married couples with other groups which may mean reducing the support for single parents to allow an increase for couples.

[daisy]

Wonderful - if you find a partner with whom you can spend a long and happy life. Sadly, this is rare. I understand that a financial incentive could promote marriage, but the average cost of a wedding is wildly expensive, and people simply cannot afford it as a wedding seems more an extravagance than a moral imperative. 20 pounds a week will not cut the divorce rate, or raise the amount of couples getting married. Nor should this devolve into a way of stripping single parents of their needed money. No one chooses to be a single parent.

[Peter]

"It is a serious sociological observation, not a right-wing cliché."

Has Daniel Finkelstein ever met a sociologist? He certainly would find it difficult to come up with a reputable one who would be willing to apply the term 'sociological' to any of Finkelstein’s conclusions. As others here have said, the confusion between correlation and causation is startlingly basic.

I have no data, but I'd bet my last penny that there is a correlation between regular showering and longevity. Presented with the evidence, a sociologist would wonder whether the sorts of people who take a pride in their personal hygiene also have healthier lifestyles than the average: perhaps they eat more sensibly, exercise more regularly, drink more moderately and smoke more rarely. A conservative commentator would urge his readers to spend as much time as possible under a stream of warm water.

[JOHN CHUCKMAN]

Yes, Daniel, it does indeed work.

It is well established that married men live on average longer than those not married.

But it only works for some.

Many are never able to find a suitable partner. Others aren't interested.

How would we expect any social institution to work for all?

There are so many human diffferences.

And while you are on the topic, why not support the availability of proper marriage, not 'civil unions' with limited rights, for gay people, as we have in Canada?