The first time I heard anyone offer marital advice I was terrified. I was a college student in the middle of a disastrous road trip. My friends and I had been trying to get to the ski slopes in my brother's ancient minibus, which usually made journeys no longer than up and down our driveway. The poor thing only lasted far enough away from home, out beyond Liverpool, and late enough into the evening that we could not call on anyone we knew for help, so while my friends waited with the vehicle, I ventured into the sole open establishment (this was before mobile phones), a local bar, full of workmen at the end of their shift, to find a phone and a tow truck. When I called, the driver told me to wait there.
Hello Kitty! There’s the long ride of marriage ahead.Credit:Paul Rovere
As I waited, nursing my lemonade, a patron started talking loudly to nobody in particular, but, in the way of many prophets, to all of us. "Here's the thing about marriage," he told the room. "You always end up going back to your f***ing wife, because no other f***ing c**t gives a s**t about you."
It was a somewhat dark picture of our most celebrated romantic institution, but not completely out of character for the era. For prior generations, marriage was like my brother's bus; it was not the ideal vehicle for their dreams, but it was what they had. And for many couples—those more committed to maintenance, or those who chose their target destinations better than I did—it worked.
We no longer think about our lifelong unions this way. Gone are the days when you found a likely contender, tied the knot, and then weathered whatever storms or becalmed seas you encountered. Getting married is now seen as a promotion to a better type of life, like an upgrade to business class, with all manner of attendant perks. People want more from marriage than just a familiar face to come home to. They want fulfillment, stimulation, security, devotion, status, liberation, connection, collaboration, personal brand enhancement, transformation and all the feels.
Permanence is temporarily out of favour. We're all about disruption.
I have been chronicling the changes in marriage for a decade, watching it change from an institution everybody expected to enter one day and muddle through, into a high-wire act — public, rewarding, quite difficult to pull off and not actually all that necessary. Being single is easier and more acceptable than ever. There is no imperative to marry. You can get what used to be considered the chief marital benefits — kids, respect, sex and financial security — another way. What was a rite of passage has become a lifestyle choice; less trip to the supermarket, more excursion through a high-end artisanal farmers' market.
If you do marry, you're dealing with an institution that has been transformed by pressures from all sides: financial (the gig economy, the rising level of debt, the vagaries of the housing market, wage stagnation), technological (advances in medicine, particularly in fertility, online dating, social media), and sociological (the rising economic independence of women, the diminishing stigma associated with being unmarried or a single parent).
Then there are the shock waves of globalism, massive digital innovation and the information revolution; seismic shifts that have all shaped the intimate little bond between two people.
Alongside those, a swarm of smaller changes have also buffeted its boundaries: the renaissance of the city, marriage equality, gender fluidity, Netflix, texting, the iPhone, meal kits, free online porn, #MeToo.
Marriage requires maintenance.
Given all this, you'd think we would prepare for being married as seriously as we prepare for, say, a driving test. After all, you can remodel a house or move. You can change careers. Your hair will grow out. With a little effort you can put most unfortunate decisions behind you. But, especially if you have kids, there are very few ways to put a former life partner completely out of view, and almost certainly no legal ones.
And yet, as a person who writes about human relations for a living, I'm staggered by how many books cross my desk that offer advice on raising happy children, or finding a happy inner life and how few that offer any research-based information on how to live more harmoniously with the person you have chosen to sleep next to, or near for the rest of your existence.
The research is out there. And unlike with so many subjects — climate change, race relations, income inequality, whether diets actually work — the news is actually pretty good. There are few things as good for your bank account, body and bedroom activity as being happily married. A Harvard study conducted over 80 years found that the healthiest men at 80 were those who were most happily married at 50.
As with all great deals, however, there's some fine print: to get the benefits you have to stay together, which is no simple matter. And you can't hate it — or each other. The idea that a long relationship is worth something on its own has got a little tarnished recently. Partly that's because permanence is temporarily out of favour. We're all about disruption. Things that have been around for a while are no longer accorded honour simply because they've endured. But there are exceptions: beautiful cathedrals, old growth forests, vintage clothes.
There are things that are worth fixing, or even better, maintaining. Your partnership may be one of them.
Belinda Luscombe is the author of Marriageology (Affirm Press).
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