Why marriage is good for society

If there is anything which demonstrates the way in which societies can evolve within a couple of generations, it is the remarkable way in which the institution of marriage - which had been a cornerstone of our nation for centuries - has been relegated in the last fifty years to simply become one option among many.

In 2021, adults were 44% more likely to have never been married than was the case in 1991. By 2023, the number of adults who were married or in a civil partnership at any one time fell below 50% for the first time ever. Fewer young people are getting married than ever before; the marriage rate for men aged 16 or over was 84.0 in 1972, but in 2023, it was just 18.1. Those that are getting married are doing so at an older age: in 1980, the median age for men getting married was 25.8, and for women, it was 23.2; today, those stand at 34.8 and 33.0. In fact, a male pensioner is now 36% more likely to get married than a young man in their early twenties in a given year.

As Christians, we believe that marriage is an institution created by God in the very beginning: it is part of his good design for humanity, laid out in Genesis 1 and 2, and reaffirmed by Jesus himself as a permanent lifelong covenant between one man and one woman. When questioned by the Pharisees about divorce, he answered: “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” (Matthew 19:4-6)

But people today - just as back then - still ask questions about marriage. Some argue that it is outdated: an archaic hangover from a patriarchal system that traded women as property. Others suggest that it forces people to face irrational and unnecessary constraints; why should they not be free to experiment with their sexuality with others, as occurs in open relationships? Many others have spoken about their disappointment in marriage, whether through being hurt by their own experience of a relationship gone wrong, or by discovering that it wasn’t the fairytale it had always been held up to be?

Many suggest that holding up marriage as the gold standard for relationships is unhelpful, untrue, and even insulting to those who experience different family arrangements, such as cohabiting or living as a single parent after family breakdown. (This can even be a difficulty within the Church, where we can be so keen, rightly, to not denigrate singleness that we do not then extol the positive virtues of marriage.)

But what does the evidence suggest? Christians believe that God’s word lays down a blueprint for how we are to order society; that it provides the best way for us to live. We are to expect God’s wisdom to not just be theologically true but experientially true; for it to chime with what we see in the world around us. That is not to say that in a fallen world, fille with broken people, every marriage will be a success. But it is to say that we would expect to see marriage in general as a good thing in our world.

Here are three groups of people who marriage is good for: it is good for couples, it is good for women, and it is good for children.

In the Church of England marriage vows, couples promise to stay together ‘til death do us part’. It always sounds like the ideal, together forever in a happy-ever-after, backed up by the messaging in everything from Disney Films to romantic novels. But in today’s world, many people question why marriage should be an essential part of that; what good does a piece of paper do? Surely if we are committed to one another, that’s enough?

At the same time, we have become almost immune to headlines around divorce rates. Back in 2001, in the film ‘Bridget Jones’ Diary’, the eponymous heroine wards off an intrusive question around why she isn’t yet married and ‘sprogged up’ by retorting, “Tell me, is it one in four marriages which ends in divorce now, or one in three”. Since then, that number has actually risen further (although it has fallen back slightly in recent years, probably because fewer people are getting married in the first place).

Indeed, Britain is now among the worst countries in the western world when ranked by family breakdown. But of course, family breakdown is not limited to married couples; quite the reverse, in fact. Unlike cohabitation, marriage is designed to be lifelong, where both parties knowingly sign up to the deal, for life, in a legal, public bond. There is far less room for confusion or ambiguity about how committed one party is to the relationship, and no quick, cheap get-out for someone who is experiencing itchy feet.

Although the Sexual Revolution led a generation to believe that they can have romantic relationships without the piece of paper that denotes marriage, the statistics are clear: research from the Policy Exchange suggested that almost 1 in 2 cohabiting parents split up before a child’s fifth birthday, while the comparable figure for married parents was just 1 in 12.

The overall trend has been supported by other surveys: a study in Germany, which followed families with children under the age of 4 across a whole decade, found that cohabiting couples were three times as likely to have separated in that time period; another 2022 study suggested that while there was a 10% chance that a married couple might split before a child’s fifth birthday, that chance was 28% for a couple which was cohabiting when the child was born. Marriage does genuinely encourage couples to stay together: one survey found that 30% of couples who have been married for ten years believe that they would have separated if they hadn’t been married.

Of course, some people would argue that this is a negative consequence of marriage: why should adults stay together if they are miserable? This argument is often made when considering the impact of divorce upon children, when people suggest it is better for children to grow up with their parents being happier but apart, than with their parents married and together.

But the data suggests that couples who stay together are often capable of working through difficult seasons. The feminist author Louise Perry writes, “between a third and a half of divorced people in the UK report in surveys that they regret their decision to divorce. There is a lot of space between ‘happy’ and ‘irreparably unhappy’. In the past, those people remained married; now they usually don’t.”

One 2017 study analyses couples who had, 10 years previously, self-described their relationships as ‘on the brink’. Again the trend had been clear: 70% of married couples had stayed together, compared to just 30% of cohabiting couples. But only 7% of the married couples were unhappy in their marriage 10 years on. (A 2024 study confirmed similar results, except in this case, none of those who had stayed together were still unhappy!) Marriage helps couples to stay together: and staying together does not just mean being miserable.

C.S. Lewis once explained the way that marriage works as follows: “If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true…But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from ‘being in love’ — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God…‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.”

It has been interesting in recent years to observe the way in which some (by no means all!) feminists have been making the case that marriage is actually a good thing for women; traditionally, this has not been the case, with marriage being regarded as an essentially patriarchal institution, and imposing a straitjacket upon women, who are then supposedly denied access to the same freedoms as men. However, the likes of Louise Perry and Mary Harrington have argued that marriage actually protects women, rather than holding them back.

This is particularly the case when it comes to motherhood. We live in a world today in which the advent of contraception has left people feeling in control of their bodies more than ever before, but also in a world where, on typical use of a contraceptive like the combined pill, efficacy is only 91%, meaning that 9 out of every 100 women will get pregnant in a given year, leaving a lot of babies who are unplanned; that is a situation which is much easier to work through when a couple is married than when they are not. Louise Perry writes, “Illicit affairs do still end in trauma and tragedy because sex is still just as consequential as it ever was.” Indeed, historically, many feminists responded to unplanned pregnancy outside marriage by speaking out against the lack of male chastity and the inability of men to restrain their libido. Some suffragists once even used the slogan “Votes for women, chastity for men”!

Marriage provides women with protections which they would not have otherwise, if simply cohabiting, or living as a lone parent. In marriage, a man has obligations: obligations to bring in income, obligations to support a wife both practically and emotionally, obligations to be a good father and obligations to contribute to a household. A woman does not have to do everything on her own: she does not have to be both the sole bread-winner and the sole care-giver, but can work in tandem with her spouse.

Perry described her experience trying to balance motherhood and employment like this: “Even those women who enjoy their work are physically incapable of performing it during the early months of a baby’s life. I should know: I began this book at the beginning of my pregnancy and completed it when my son was six months old.

“Writing is probably one of the easiest jobs to combine with motherhood, but even so there were weeks on end during which I didn’t write a word because I was too busy caring for my baby. And while I could be practically supported by other people, including my husband, I was irreplaceable as mother - not only because I was the only person who could breastfeed, but also because children have a relationship with their mothers that starts from conception, and that relationship cannot be handed over without distress to both mother and baby…

“If we want to keep that maternal bond intact, then the only solution is for another person to step in during these times of vulnerability and do the tasks needed to keep a household warm and fed. Perhaps we could call that person a spouse. Perhaps we could call their legal and emotional bond a marriage.”

Indeed, marriage also has the advantage of providing mothers with legal protections; many women find that motherhood can bring with it a degree of career sacrifice, and the financial impact which that entails. In marriage, they are paired with someone who will not necessarily have had to make all of the same sacrifices. Furthermore, as already stated, the permanence of marriage provides a far safer context for a woman who is looking to have children, as parents are considerably less likely to separate when married than when cohabiting.

The effect of marriage is twofold: their relationship with the child’s father is more likely to last, and even if it does not, marriage provides them with a legal commitment that they will be provided for. It is not hard to see why some modern feminist writers are re-evaluating the assumptions they have inherited. In fact, in 2025, Louise Perry said that understanding Christian ethics had actually led her to faith: “One of the reasons that I ended up becoming a Christian is because I realised if it were supernaturally true, you would expect it to be sociologically true, and observing quite how sociologically true it is was very persuasive to me and I know it has been for others as well.” For Perry, and some other feminist authors today, Christian teaching just makes sense: they believe that marriage is a good thing for women too.

Matt Goodwin’s words, tragically, will resonate with many people who have seen their parents split up, and many similar anecdotes could be found.

As Christians, we believe that marriage is the best foundation for raising children: although not every marriage will result in children, for a variety of reasons, God lays out his blueprint for family life in Genesis 2:24, in which children are born (and raised) within the context of marriage between one man and one woman. Although individual parents can do an excellent job, overall, the trend is clear: generally, family breakdown is more likely to lead to more negative outcomes for children.

Research from the Department for Education in 2025 revealed that children living with both biological parents, in two-parent households had the highest life satisfaction. Previous research by the NHS found that 17% of children of single parents had mental health issues, compared to 12% of children of cohabiting parents, and just 6% of children of married parents. Other studies in the USA and the UK have found that children who are in cohabiting or single-parent families are twice as likely to fail to complete secondary school, and a 2014 study from the family lawyers' association, Resolution found that 65% of children of divorced parents believed that their GCSE results had been adversely affected (and 44% said so at A-level). In fact, the consequence of divorce has been shown to have a greater impact on children’s education than parental death.

This is to say nothing of the relational impact of family breakdown in the moment; although many people want to say that it is better for children to be in a happy home with a single parent than an unhappy one with both, and that it does not make sense for a couple to stay together for the sake of their children, it is clear that the process of parents splitting up can be extremely traumatic, not least because they can often end up caught in the middle of a dispute.

According to a study from Resolution, almost a third of children said that parents were trying to "turn them against" the other parent, and around a quarter said that parents were deliberately trying to involve their children in the dispute. Older generations are also impacted: around a fifth of young people lose all contact with a grandparent when their parents split up.

Adding in step-parents can also add in new levels of complexity, particularly while children are young. Although many step-parents can and do do an excellent job, some evolutionary psychologists refer to the ‘Cinderella effect’: tragically, a step-parent is 40-100x more likely to kill a step-child, and they are also significantly higher to sexually abuse them. The Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker once described step-parenthood as ‘the strongest risk factor for child abuse ever identified’.

Just as concerningly, the effects of family breakdown were not just limited to the short-term. The Centre for Social Justice found in 2019 that children in broken families are more than twice as likely to experience poverty. They are also:

• 2.3 times more likely to experience homelessness

• 2.0 times more likely to have trouble with the police

• 1.8 times more likely to experience alcoholism

• 1.7 times more likely to experience teenage pregnancy

• 1.7 times more likely to experience mental health issues

• 1.6 times more likely to experience debt.

And tragically, the effects can be cyclical: when someone experienced family breakdown when they were young, they were then themselves almost 2 times less likely to remain with the other parent of their own children. That is assuming that the person affected even has the desire to form a long-term relationship (or get married) at all; all of us are shaped by our own experiences, and our expectations are formed by what we have seen around us, particularly while growing up.

Despite the statistics, politicians are often reticent to talk about marriage, often for fear of offending people in different living situations. In 2023, the then-Conservative MP Danny Kruger spoke at the National Conservativism conference about the importance of marriage, talking about “the normative family, held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children, and the sake of their own parents, and the sake of themselves. This is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.”

The clip was then analysed on the Newsagents Podcast, in which Jon Sopel played it back to the former Conservative Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who had his hands over his eyes in a visceral demonstration of his dismay; Hancock’s response is revealing of what politicians think is acceptable: “It is so offensive, and it’s so wrong…I’m a tolerant kind of guy, but don’t try to impose it on everybody else, thank you very much, and certainly don’t try to give any impression that it is anything other than a completely fringe view within the Conservative party…please can we stop talking about this.”

A number of commentators have noted that the cultural elites - such as in the political class and the media - like to present it as an enlightened view that there is no such thing as an ideal family arrangement, and that all structures are equal, whilst adhering themselves to traditional models. The Marriage Foundation pointed out in 2017 that at that stage, it had been more than 10 years since a Cabinet Minister had discussed marriage in public policy, even though more than 80% of Ministers in that time had been married themselves.

That has meant marriage being unfairly deprioritised in policy decisions, such as in the tax system: Britain is actually an outlier among comparably sized economies in the West: a one-earner married couple with two children on average wages here pays 70% more tax than a comparable French family, more than twice as much as a comparable US family and 15 times as much as that of a comparable German family.

It has also meant far more money having to be diverted to cope with the effects of family break-down. In 2018, the UK spent around £51 billion/year on family breakdown, more than it did that year on Defence. The American political commentator Rick Santorum explains: “The family is the first economy. If the family breaks down, well, the government gets bigger because of the consequences of family breakdown. We see in the neighbourhoods where there are no marriages and there are no two-parent families.”

The feminist writer Louise Perry has commented about the positive benefits which promoting the institution of marriage tends to bring: “When monogamy is imposed on a society, it tends to become richer. It has lower rates of both child abuse and domestic violence, since conflict between co-wives tends to generate both. Birth rates and crime rates both fall, which encourages economic development, and wealthy men, denied the opportunity to devote their resources to acquiring more wives, instead invest elsewhere: in property, businesses, employees, and other productive endeavours.”

Interestingly, despite the reticence of politicians to talk about marriage, the traditional family unit continues to be a popular aspiration: although the proportion of the population who have never been married is on the rise, survey data from 2021 suggests that, among those under 30, 86% of unmarried women and 80% of unmarried men do want to get married at some point. However, marriage rates are not even across British society: different ethnicities (and the cultures represented by them) do not get married evenly. The lowest marriage rate is amongst Black Caribbean Brits (only 27%). 43.5% of White Brits are married, and the figure rises to more than 60% among Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi individuals.

But even if politicians don’t want to get involved in affairs of the bedroom, most of them do want to work against inequality in our nation. Tragically, poverty is linked with higher rates of family breakdown. Lone parenthood is at its highest in poorer parts of the UK: it is at its highest in the London boroughs of Southwark, Lambeth and Islington, where more than 40% children live in single-parent families. In affluent areas like St Albans, Guildford and Wokingham, that figure is less than 17%.

There is increasingly a ‘marriage gap’ in the UK: the difference in marriage rates between wealthier and poorer individuals is only getting broader. This gap has doubled within the last 35 years alone. In 1988, those in the lowest socio-economic groups were 19% less likely to be married than those in the highest. Today, that gap stands at 37%. This then has a knock-on effect on children in particular. 71% of mothers in the top socio-economic group are married when they give birth: that compares with just 18% in the very poorest.

In reality, the British public does want to see the Government tackling the challenges around marriage and family break-down. Five in six (83%) British adults say that stronger families are important in addressing Britain’s social problems. Nine in ten (89%) British adults who are in their second marriage or more agree that the government is right to say the stability of a family matters for children. And nearly two thirds (63%) of British adults who are in their second marriage or more still agree that it is too easy to get a divorce today.

At a time when marriage rates are falling, when adults are 44% more likely to have never been married than was the case even thirty years ago, and in a world where ⅔ of single British adults believe people do not have enough money to get married, at CARE, we long to see our society transformed, by couples being encouraged to pursue commitment, families being strengthened, and more support being given to help partners stay together.

We believe that marriage is a good part of how God has designed our world, and that he gave it to us as a blessing: let us pray that we might be willing to receive that blessing as a society once again.