Fairytale weddings are just that: fiction

So marriage is becoming less popular than ever, according to the Office for National Statistics. Various explanations are offered in today's Guardian report , the most mystifying being the one offered by Samantha Callan, the "specialist" for family and society policy at a thinktank run by Iain Duncan Smith. She talks of "the social bragging rights that come with not being married". The what? The Guardian also reports today, though, on the story of the woman who poisoned her ex-lover's curry when he announced he was dumping her in order to marry a younger woman. Well, there's another disincentive. What amazes me is that anyone gets married at all. For hundreds of years, since Shakespeare really, people have noticed that comedies end with a marriage; in other words, the laughter stops. Congreve noted that courtship was to marriage as a witty prologue was to a dull play; and a current T-shirt shows a stylised smiley-faced bride next to a sad-faced groom; the caption is "game over". In other words, the diminishing popularity of marriage is simply a matter of increasing clarity. Up until the first world war, pretty much the only way, unless exceptionally fortunate, a man was going to find out what a woman's naked body looked like was to marry one, or see a prostitute – itself, in those days, a highly risky business, what with there being no cure for venereal disease. How a woman ever got to see a man's naked body without marrying him was either to become a prostitute herself, not exactly appealing, or risk ostracism by polite society. Under the weight of its promises – the whole for better/for worse, complete fidelity thing – relationships are placed under great strain. These are heavy terms to labour under, especially in a sexualised world. So you either take these terms seriously, which is both difficult and rare, or you do not – and then, you may ask, what is the point of agreeing to them, or even uttering them, in the first place? My ex-wife, after six happy years of living with me, persuaded me to marry her on the grounds that we would not only be able to have a really good party and get loads of presents, but that we would be able to have affairs. Eh? Because, she explained, cheating on your boyfriend/girlfriend is just sleazy, but having an extra-marital affair is exciting and sophisticated. Oh, all right then, I said. This agreement reached, she then added that she had been lying about the affair business and that if I did so she'd chop my balls off. A cunning ruse, I must say – and we did have a great party. But that was a long time ago, and our marriage has gone the way so many of them do now. It is telling that the epithet most often applied to weddings is "fairytale" ( 269,000 results on Google ). Fairytales are indeed lovely and the world would be much poorer without them; but the chief characteristic of the fairytale, we should remember, is that it is not real. It is good that people are beginning to realise this. It would be a whole lot better if parental separation wasn't so hard on their children; perhaps it wouldn't be if they didn't believe too fervently in that particular fairytale, either.