Why we all need to commit - 11/22/07

[Smartmarriages]

- WHY WE ALL NEED TO COMMIT
The London Times
November 22, 2007 

Why we all need to commit
My attitude to marriage is changing. My middle-class reluctance to judge
others is fading
Camilla Cavendish

My friend Ann and her girlfriend are having IVF in New York. My friend Hatty
is ³basting² every month in London with a gay male friend who has offered to
help her have the baby she longs for. My mate Shona shacked up with her
boyfriend the day she met him, and was pregnant after two months. They all
ask: do you think I'm doing the right thing?

What can I say? Except that it's pure luck that I ended up with a nice
bloke, two children and a ring on my finger, and I could never judge any of
these three for finding their own way to make a family. They are educated,
they are solvent, they are mature, they have inner resources that will make
them great parents.

So when the BBC recently asked me to make a radio programme about the return
of marriage to the centre of political debate, I assumed I'd be taking a
pretty liberal line. Experts of all political stripes are agreed that
stability is hugely important for children. But stability, I figured, surely
came in all shapes and sizes.

The reality nags at me. Analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study, of 18,500
babies born in 2000 and 2001, finds that education, income and age (the
higher the better) are important factors in whether two parents will stay
together. But the biggest single determinant of stability is whether they
are married or not. About half ‹ half! ‹ of cohabitees split up before their
child reaches 5. The richest 20 per cent of cohabiting couples do better,
but their rate of breakup is no better than that of the poorest 20 per cent
of married couples. So while poverty puts a strain on relationships,
marriage seems to buffer that strain.

This has made me wonder whether it is a bit of a middle-class luxury to be
so reluctant to judge other people's relationships. Is it, in fact, a kind
of snobbery in those of us who babble about the liberation of alternative
life choices, who know nothing of the ugliness and loneliness of a teenage
mother's life on benefits? We like to think of lone mothers as robust
martyrs, struggling but winning in quiet, spartan homes. But at the lower
end of the scale the reality is often a succession of boyfriends who bring a
hugely inflated risk of domestic violence both to the mother and to the
child who witnesses it (who is more likely in his turn to become violent).

What we are really doing, when we say that anything goes, is denigrating
commitment. And that is a problem. For commitment, experts agree, can make
the difference between a happy, well-adjusted child and one for whom life
will be much more of a struggle. In fact, lack of parental commitment is a
serious barrier to social mobility.

I still don't think it's the ring on the finger that matters as much as the
attitudes that seem to go with marriage. Can we bottle these and spread them
around? Academics at Denver University have developed a ³theory of
commitment² that says, essentially, that the best relationships are those in
which two people see themselves as ³us² more than as ³you and me². They make
sacrifices for each other, and give priority to each other's needs. They
have found that men who ³slide² into relationships, moving in before they
get engaged, often remain less committed to the relationship (whether or not
they eventually get married) than men who ³decide² first that they want to
get married and then move in together.

While the women they study tend to see moving in as the point of commitment,
many of the men admit they are still hoping to find someone better. When a
child comes along, they are more likely to feel trapped than those who can
see that child fitting into a lifetime commitment. Maybe this explains why
some UK charities now describe children who have never known an adult to put
their needs first ‹ a dismal fact that I have found myself coming back to
over and over; a selfishness of desperate proportions.

The Denver study is a surprising, modern vindication of an old-fashioned
idea. You don't get much support from your peers these days if you ask him
not to move in until you're engaged. But human nature does not always move
as fast as fashion. The poorer you are, the less you can afford to be
prissy. But our reluctance to make a distinction between living together and
being committed to each other doesn't do anyone a service.

It's hard to make sense of other people's lives. But our desire to blot out
difference makes it even harder. There is less up-to-date research in this
area than there should be, because marriage no longer exists as a
statistical category. The term ³marital status² was abolished in government
research in 2003. Everyone is now a ³couple parent family² or a ³lone parent
family².

Another result of our squeamishness is that the State intervenes mainly to
pick up the pieces of family breakdown ‹ crime, drugs, poverty ‹ rather than
trying to prevent it in the first place. This leads some people to see these
problems as intractable. But that can't be right. Experiments from Bristol
to Milwaukee suggest that you can teach people how to live better together,
just as you can give antenatal classes about birth.

The paradox is that the more the State tries to intervene, the more it is
resented. Normal families don't want to be told what to feed their children.
But some people need to be. The Government wants more stability, but it
fears stigmatising any group.

But to return to where I began. Shona's boyfriend has left her. He said he
³wasn't ready². She'll be all right. Her own parents ‹ like those of all
three of the friends I mentioned ‹ are supportive and are still together.
Still living the rather banal suburban existence that we all affect to
despise. Stability is so dull. But we need to stop dissing it and take
another look at the facts.

‹ The Blessing of Marriage is broadcast tonight at 8.30pm on Radio 4 and
repeated on Sunday at 9.30pm

To read article comments:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/camilla_cavendish/articl
e2917180.ece


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