UK Men Have Fallen in Love with Marriage
Finally, something to celebrate: divorce rates during the early years of marriage have plunged to their lowest level for more than 30 years. Young couples who tie the knot are surviving even the infamous seven-year itch.
What accounts for this welcome change? The new British groom. He is romantic and responsible, and only gets married because he really, really wants to.
What accounts for this welcome change? The new British groom. He is romantic and responsible, and only gets married because he really, really wants to.
I know this sounds counterintuitive, as the stereotype of the cold and clumsy British husband has enjoyed a long lifespan. I first came to Britain in 1979 to St Clare’s Hall, a sixth-form college in north Oxford where glamorous continental girls studied beside well-bred Sloanes. Both lots of girls vied for attention from the undergraduates down the road; but that didn’t stop them warning one another (and me) about husbands who preferred their labrador to their wife, and their club to their home. This Professor Higgins image clung to Britain’s males for years: superior, misogynist and self-obsessed, he could drive a girl to gin within a few months of marital hell.
Since then, the image of the British hubby has changed. Popular fiction is full of sympathetic, sentimental heroes. Richard Curtis has portrayed endless sweet, soppy men who yearn for love; Colin Firth in the Bridget Jones films showed that beneath Darcy’s diffidence beat a restless romantic heart; and the wildly popular novel One Day celebrated a love story that haunted the hero beyond his wife’s death. These fictional Britons believed in, and sometimes attained, “happily ever after”.
In real life, politicians too have helped change the world’s view of the British husband. Say what you will about Dave’s failure to get more women into Parliament, but he, Nick and Ed have proved laudably uxorious. They and their wives have turned Westminster into a couples’ haven to admire.
And, indeed, envy. Foreign women friends who once longed for a man in Brooks Brothers who spent money like the Great Gatsby now consider my English husband as much a must-have as the Samsung Galaxy S5. “Does he dote on you the way Nick Clegg does on his señora?” they ask. “Is he a hands-on Daddy like Dave the nappy-changer?” “Does he insist on holding on hands as you stroll down the beach, like Ed did with Justine?”
These men, the real as well as the unreal, seem to enjoy, nay positively thrive in, their marriages. What was once a trap awaiting the unthinking man seems something close to Nirvana. It helps that no one is forced into it. More liberal mores mean that today’s lovelorn swain cannot be pushed by family and society to “do the right thing”. The shotgun wedding, except in certain ultra-orthodox religious households, is a thing of the past: cohabitation is commonplace, as is raising a child solo. Parents cannot claim that their daughter’s honour has been ruined, any more than that their son and heir must consider lineage when he takes a bride.
Today’s groom doesn’t need to contend with the first wave of feminists, either. Any graduate of a “women’s studies” course will remember learning that men were foes and marriage their patriarchal invention. If we foolishly fell for the enemy, he would choke the life force out of us. More than one generation of wives embraced this philosophy, and dumped their husband in order to find themselves in an Indian ashram or with a Greek tavern owner. Thankfully, this philosophy has gone the way of the Atkins diet: it was binned for leaving a bitter taste in the mouth, and sapping the joie de vivre of those who bought into it.
Today’s bride knows she is not a lamb to the slaughter. Her groom realises that he isn’t either. Maybe that’s why new marriages work.
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