Donald Clarke: Why is marriage still so popular?

Marriage is an obsolete relic of discredited sexist philosophies. Why do we still do it? Okay, there is not enough space to even attempt an answer to this question. Here’s a more manageable one.

Why are such views now seen as the preserve of cranks and misanthropes?

It was not always thus. Thomas Hardy offered furious arguments against the institution in Jude the Obscure. For much of the late 20th century, western society seemed to be drifting away from marriage.

It was common for religious people to suggest the institution was doomed. Yet, the obsolete relic refused to roll over and die.

Last week, for another part of this newspaper, I interviewed campaigner Helen Pankhurst. Briefly visible in the new film Suffragette, Dr Pankhurst is the granddaughter of feminist and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst.

A key lieutenant in the campaign for women’s suffrage, the older Pankhurst was adamantly opposed to marriage and created a minor stir by refusing to marry Helen’s grandfather.

Those attitudes buzzed about the contemporaneous Bloomsbury Group and became a core doctrine for the bohemian tendency.

A few decades later, as the 1960s set in, a less strident, everyday antipathy towards marriage began to trouble fringes of the mainstream. Was it worth bothering with?

Earlier this year, Bill Nighy, who was romantically linked to fellow actor Diana Quick for 18 years, told me that marriage had never really occurred to them.

“Marriage is sort of back in now, isn’t it? There wasn’t a lot if it about back then,” he said.

Jonathan Pryce, Nighy's old colleague from the Liverpool Everyman, recently told Mark Lawson that, after 43 years with Kate Fahy, his accountant persuaded him to tie the knot for financial reasons.

“The only reason to get married now is inheritance tax,” he said.

Jenni Murray, the presenter of Women’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, got a kicking from the tabloids for approving Mary Wollstonecraft’s notion that marriage is “legalised prostitution”.

Get out of the way, Hardy, Pankhurst, Pryce and Murray. As Mr Nighy has observed, marriage is “back in”.

Look at that nice Jeremy Corbyn. He may be opposed to nuclear weapons, the monarchy and the House of Lords, but that didn't stop him getting hitched three timeson three occasions.

Unstoppable rise

Weddings are louder, gaudier and more expensive than they have ever been. Cranks of the generation that came of age in the 1970s and early 1980s grudgingly attended discrete, hurried services to keep observant parents quiet.

They (we?) now gaze awe-struck at the unstoppable rise of a wedding industry powered by pomp and ostentation.

Men are expected fork out for stag weekends in former Soviet republics. Women risk bankruptcy to pay for spa weekends at restored medieval piles.

Changes to the law here have ironed out most of the inequalities that once rendered wives little more than chattel. No grumpiness about the relevance of marriage should dull any joy at the victory by the “Yes” side in the recent referendum.

This doesn't explain why people want to get married. Even if the Catholic Church were to ordain women and abolish the celibacy requirement, few of us would (stay with my creaky analogy, here) suddenly find the desire to become a priest.

Those who, through religious conviction, feel it morally wrong to have sex outside marriage are in a dwindling minority.

Yes, there are financial advantages, but I get no sense the couple getting yoked together on that beach in Maui are thinking first of inheritance rights.

Like the lar gibbon or the Malagasy giant rat, humans often mate for life but, unlike those creatures, we sometimes feel the need to celebrate that union in public. Fair enough.

But for the cranks who still naively foster anti-establishment attitudes dating back to Sylvia Pankhurst and beyond, it remains baffling that couples feel the need to involve the state in such romantic arrangements.

We often hear that it is hopelessly outdated for women to change their surnames to those of their husbands. This is indisputable. But the practice is no more archaic than the business of marriage itself.

Financial ruin

Humans are creatures of habit. Even the unconventional find it hard to shake off conventions.

Some people do it for the sickeningly indulgent week-long plunge into financial ruin. Others just get sick of explaining why it hasn’t yet happened.

We cranks who object find ourselves categorised with campaigners for Esperanto, followers of Erich von Däniken and those arguing for a flat Earth.

They once thought female suffrage just as crazy, you know. Tiocfaidh ár lá.