Family breakdown is at a record high. It’s time the Church fought for marriage again

Everybody wants reliable love. Aside from the few brave souls called to the single life, most of us want somebody with whom we can share life, someone to raise children with, grow old alongside. Someone who will put up with our shortcomings and love us in spite of who we are — for life.

The trouble is that fewer and fewer of us are finding that reliable love. Family breakdown in the UK has now risen to the highest levels since records began. Yet almost nobody is talking about it.

Back in the 1970s when I was a teenager, I was one of the 8 per cent of children not living with both natural parents. One in twelve. Today, family breakdown affects 45 per cent of teenagers. One in two. Some level of family breakdown is inevitable and possibly even welcome. Humans mess up and behave badly. You’d have to take a pretty hard-line approach to think that couples experiencing abuse, adultery or addiction should tough it out. So perhaps 5, 10 or 15 per cent of family breakdown might be acceptable. But 45 per cent?

The familial decline

What’s worse is that this figure is likely to increase for two reasons. The first is that family breakdown transmits down the generations. If your parents split up, you’re more likely to split up. You are by no means cursed to this fate. But you’re fighting the odds from the start — perhaps because you never saw your parents model a successful relationship, or because your childhood circumstances were made more difficult by your parents split. As today’s teenagers become tomorrow’s parents, we can expect family breakdown to get worse.

The second reason is the growing number of cohabiting relationships — which are far more likely to end. Today, more than two thirds of parents who split up were never married, while five out of six parents remain together are married.

Paradoxically, we now have rising family breakdown yet falling divorce rates, now back down to 1970s levels. I doubt divorce rates will come down much further. But the trend away from marriage will continue, and family breakdown will grow further, unless we talk about marriage, reclaim marriage and do something about marriage. But why?

Why marriage matters

The simple reason is that turning our backs on marriage means we have turned our backs on commitment.

A few years ago, I decided to have a crack at running a marathon. I’d run loads of half marathons but had always been nervous about trashing my knees enduring a full marathon. Anyway, I decided I’d do it — I found out how others had done it, made a plan, started training and stuck to my plan. At the back of my mind, I always knew I had an exit route if I couldn’t hack it, but after three months training, I grew confident I could do it, so only then did I tell my friends and begin raising money. That was the moment I committed.

Making decisions, making plans, removing any lingering doubts, and then telling your friends and family are the ingredients of commitment. There’s a whole psychology behind this regarding how decisions, signals and social support change the way we think and behave. If this is true for success in life goals, it’s just as much true for success in relationships.

These are the ingredients of commitment that are automatically built into the act of marriage. Of course you can commit without getting married. But you’d have to do all the same things in a much more intentional way. Some couples do. But most don’t. It’s the act of commitment present in marriage that makes married couples automatically more likely to find that reliable love. And yes, I did complete the marathon and, by the skin of my teeth, I’m also about to complete 39 years of marriage.

I think we’ve become far too relaxed about marriage. It’s OK if you do. It’s OK if you don’t. No, it’s not.

If you want reliable love, the best way to persuade two fallible humans to achieve it together is through marriage. As Christians, we should know this. But we’ve lost confidence. Think about the lost potential and lost future for so many couples and their children. Just because we are gracious, loving and compassionate to families that split up doesn’t mean that we should accept record levels of mostly avoidable family breakdown.

It’s time to challenge the status quo and regain our confidence in a relationship structure that stacks the odds of reliable love in our favour.

We need to talk about marriage.