Co-habiting is a commitment
by Jumoke Akintola
Iain Duncan Smith gave a speech to the House of Commons today where he argued that: ‘Marriage is perhaps the best antidote to the celebrity-, self-obsessed culture we live in, for it is about understanding that our true value is lastingly expressed through the lives that we commit with others’. This speech is part of a wider debate on whether to reward couples who marry and stay married with financial incentives, such as tax breaks. Critics of this initiative, which include the Deputy Prime Minister, argue that it is patronising and outdated.
In The Home Front, Demos recommends instead that the Government does not introduce a married tax allowance. The pamphlet argues that notions of marriage and marital arrangements such as the ones that Duncan Smith describes bear no weight when measuring children’s outcomes or the likelihood of family breakdown. Rather, it is the quality of relationships that matter and thus should be supported.
A second concern with Duncan Smith’s speech is his conflation of family breakdown with unmarried couples. With statements such as ‘Government must understand the effect that family breakdown can have on the well-being of both adults and children’ and, ‘Family breakdown is not only damaging for individuals, it also imposes "incredibly high" financial and social costs on society as a whole’, he ignores successful, unmarried couples and seems to assume that married couples do not break up. Recent ONS figures show that although the divorce rate is falling, it is still higher than in the past.
I return to the quote at the beginning of this article: how exactly is marriage an antidote to the celebrity culture that we live in? Tiger Woods, Britney Spears and Katie Price were all married. The gossip weeklies and monthlies are full of celebrity weddings, some last and unfortunately some don’t, but a lack of high-profile marital unions clearly isn’t a problem. Finally, the suggestion that our greatest achievement lies in our commitment to others and that this commitment must be in the form of marriage is blinkered. Around 2.2 million couples are co-habiting: they do not enter into this lightly and one can assume that they are committed to doing it right.
Malcolm.Rasala
"....if we collectively value stable family structures". Some of us do not.
Indeed arguably more and more do not. And why not? Imposing directly or indirectly formal christian marriage ceremonies is nonsense in an increasingly non-christian society. If people want to marry fine.
If they want to marry through a civil ceremony, gay or straight fine.
If anyone wants to marry in a church etc fine. But people living together is their choice not anybody else's. Adam Scoenborn's and IDS old fashioned right wing morality is hypocritical when more middle class marriages end in divorce than working class. People should be free to come together as and when they wish. And they should and do break up when they wish. It is nobody elses business. Mr Schoenborn and IDS should keep their noses out of the private morality of others. Period! As for "reinforced legal sanctions and strong social norms" in your dreams bedroom snoopers!
Colin Fishwick
"Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly" Voltaire
Adam Schoenborn
"With statements such as ‘Government must understand the effect that family breakdown can have on the well-being of both adults and children’ and, ‘Family breakdown is not only damaging for individuals, it also imposes "incredibly high" financial and social costs on society as a whole’, he ignores successful, unmarried couples and seems to assume that married couples do not break up. Recent ONS figures show that although the divorce rate is falling, it is still higher than in the past."
This doesn't follow logically, the implication need only be that separation rates are higher amongst the unmarried. Which they are. To take one of countless examples, according to data from the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (cited in "Separations, Reconciliations, and Living Apart in Cohabiting and Marital Unions" Binstock, Georgina, 2003):
"Cohabiting couples were nearly eight times more likely to separate due to discord than married couples in the first year of a relationship. Cohabiting couples were nearly four times more likely to separate in the second year and three times more likely to separate in the third year. Cohabiting couples had a separation rate five times that of married couples, and following separation, cohabiting couples had a rate of reconciliation that was one-third that of married couples."
The real challenge is whether marriage causes this effect, or whether it just happens to be correlated with it. I suspect it is somewhere in between, obviously more stable couples are more likely to marry - but we are increasingly aware of the behavioural implications of making commitments - particularly formal and legally binding pledges, particularly in public, particularly in front of people that we respect, etc. - all of which are typically features of marriage.
Although you call IDS' position on marriage "patronising and outdated," watchwords of modern liberalism, your argument points to the flaws of liberal individualism - which cannot easily reconcile individual choice with inherently public goods like positive social norms around marriage. Again behavioural psychology suggests that the kinds of norms and social attitudes we have towards say marriage, impact the decisions we take.
Co-habiting is clearly not the same level of commitment as marriage, which is great - it means you can cohabit with someone and then stop, without any terribly serious consequences. But it is important that we have a more serious option than that, reinforced by legal sanctions and strong social norms, if we collectively value stable family structures.