Apr 11 2007
The decline of marriage
Today’s Social Trends publication reveals just how many people now live on their own, and how many live with another but do not marry.?? 29% are living in single person households,and 24% are single parent families.
It is not surprising, given the incentives the tax and benefits system sends, and given the legal framework surrounding marriage.
Single parenthood is commonest in the parts of the country where incomes are lowest and unemployment is highest. The tax and benefit system can make it more worthwhile for a single parent to claim benefits than try to get a small share of a small income out of a partner.
Both Conservative and Labour governments have tried to pursue fathers to make a financial contribution. In some cases this encourages irresponsible men to disappear, or to be out of work, or to claim they are self employed but earning very little. If the payments from the father mainly reduce the benefits paid to the mother there is not a huge incentive for her to pursue the case.
Marriage used to be the norm because social convention and family economics reinforced it. 100 years ago it was regarded as normal for the man in the household to go out to work to bring in an income, and for the woman to stay at home and carry out all the hard work of cooking, cleaning, homemaking and child care in the pre machine and free nursery age. The two needed each other to get?? by. This economic mutual dependence was reinforced by strong social convention, with disapproval in most communities if a couple did not marry.
Today most women go out to work so they have an income of their own, or can claim a benefit income of their own. More men??realise they can ??cook and clean, and have discovered the non iron shirt. There is??no longer the same social pressure to marry.
Some successful men and women are put off marrying in the first place, because it redistributes capital and income form the more successful (financially) to the less successful partner in a marriage. Whilst this may be fair where one partner has sacrificed career and income to bring up children and to mind the home over a long time period, it is less clear why it should happen in shorter failed marriages without children.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
I know women that are in long term relationships with divorced men who got so badly burnt first time around they won’t commit to their second girlfriend, they don’t want any more children with them even though she has none, they don’t want to get married because they wouldn’t want to split the equity he’s built up in their house if it went sour. These men want a financial contribution towards the bills, they expect their new partner to act as a full time wife and substitute mother at the weekends and holidays but they won’t give them any protection over their joint home, often willing their home to their child/ren which would leave a partner of 20 years homeless.
I cannot understand why these women put up with this, they shrug and say “well what can I do, I can’t force him to marry me”.
When it all starts to boil down to money its a mess. Stories in the press like the McCartneys don’t help - she’ll try to take him to the cleaners etc. A man has got to be able to protect his pre-marriage equity or this will just get worse and worse and women will be the long term losers.
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My second daughter will not marry her partner until she has paid off her debts from two degrees. She says that it wouldn’t fair because he has already cleared his debts and shouldn’t be expected to share hers.
It must be modern thinking. I married her mother to get rid of my debts!
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