Love in the 21st century

Is there anything left to say about that over-examined institution, The Couple? Is there anything new or worthwhile to add to the old, old story? Boy meets girl, blah, blah, blah. Bridget Jones, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But here we are, squaring up to the subject one more time. Love in the 21st century is both the same and different; mutating interestingly as we try to reconfigure it for lives led at a different speed, but its power is undiminished, its grip on our hearts and record collections as strong as ever. But here's the thing: while all the world loves a lover, nobody loves a couple.

Since the 17th century, it's been the pursuit of love that has fascinated us, not what we do with it when we get it. All love stories end with a wedding, but where once we presumed the lovers faded away into a happy ever after, now they just fade away. Couples are uninteresting at best - if you're married, or as good as, don't expect to find yourself the subject of a snappy sitcom on Channel 4. Or they're malignant, 'smug marrieds', bourgeois, superior and sexless. If you don't recognise yourself as any of the above, you will at least admit that coupledom is a bit of a slog, and where's the fun in that? Smart books are written about the 'tyranny of two' and the unhealthiness of co-dependency.

Which brings us to the one question left worth asking in the blizzard of love talk: why bother? Why put yourself through the pain and work and scorn of conventional coupledom when there are plenty of postmodern alternatives? For all kinds of ideological, biological, practical, romantic and lifestyle reasons, The Couple should be as common as the dodo. Why, in spite of the passion-killing grind that is daily domesticity, do we go on shacking up together? We all know about the 40 per cent divorce rate, so why do we still get married?

Love arrives, or grows, but marriage is a decision. Love feels like something outside ourselves. We talk about being struck by Cupid's arrow, or 'falling' in love, we're overtaken by emotion, we 'can't help' how we feel. But marriage happens from the inside out, and in the head as well as the heart, even if we later decide we weren't thinking straight. 'How can you be 100 per cent sure?' say wary singletons to their marrying friends. And the answer is, they're not. Nobody is 100 per cent sure of marriage, with its 40 per cent divorce rate, and who knows how many more per cent stuck miserably together. Instead, we decide that we love this person enough, we find them interesting enough, and we think we're ready enough to draw a line in the sand and say, this is it. All committed couples are optimists. We commit in the hope and belief that love and interest won't diminish, but grow. It's an act of faith.

And most of us still make it. Fifty-four per cent of men and 52 per cent of women in the UK are married, with a further 10 per cent of men and nine per cent of women cohabiting, most of whom will eventually tie the knot, according to the General Household Survey. Just six per cent of men and nine per cent of women are divorcees, in spite of the divorce rate. Most wait just long enough for the scar tissue to heal before jumping in again: one in four marriages is a re-marriage. And yet marriage rates have been declining for 30 years. Last year there were just 249,227 marriages (the lowest rate since 1897, when the population was about half the current number). At the same time, the age at which we get married has been steadily rising. Your average first-time newlyweds will now be 34 (him) and 32 (her).

What does this tell us? That we still believe in commitment, or that increasingly we don't?

'What it tells us is that patterns of commitment are changing,' says Penny Mansfield, director of One Plus One Marriage and Partnership Research. 'Cohabitation and liberal divorce laws have allowed us to try out more relationships before committing to one.' Commitment is what makes the big difference in relationships, married or not, and committed cohabitation can be just as big and binding as a marriage. So why do so few couples choose that option in the long term? Why do we still get married?

'It may be for religious, cultural or legal reasons, or because we want to have a family,' says Mansfield. 'Many people living happily together decide to marry just before or after having children. And not just for convention's sake. They want their situation sanctified, or given a legal framework. It's a way of saying that the relationship is bigger than the people in it. Wills, inheritance, rights of property, pensions, separation, children and access to them are all affected by marriage.'

Most of us don't know this, whether we're married or not, until we come up against it. One friend of mine who lived with his partner and son for five years, was shocked to find he had no automatic legal right to see his child when they split up.

My partner and I married, having lived together for eight years, after he was taken to hospital and we had to wait for his mother to sign the consent form for his operation. In the eyes of the world, or at least the law, those eight years counted for nothing. I was surprised by how excluded I felt. At one of those dark life-or-death moments, I wanted to be his next of kin.

I doubt if anybody gets married thinking about inheritance tax or longevity rates, but there's an elephantine stack of surveys going back decades showing that couples are healthier, happier and wealthier than singles. Jessie Bernard's famous book, The Future of Marriage, started it off in the early 70s when she found that married men lived longer, enjoyed better health and greater long-term prosperity than single or divorced men. Married women, on the other hand, didn't get the same benefits, and were more prone to depression. We've been quoting that research for 30 years, but it's out of date. Social change and female independence (inside and outside relationships) have levelled the playing field.

'A good relationship acts as a buffer against stress, depression and the general toughness and challenges of life,' says Mansfield. Couldn't we all, deep down, do with a buffer against the toughness of life?

And, of course, we marry or we move in, more than anything else, for love. 'It's a deep human need to connect with another,' says Mansfield. 'Whether we want marriage or not, we all want to love and be loved, really and deeply.' Well, yes. And the point is, to be really loved is a lifetime's work. You'll never forget those three days in Paris when it was all new, and where you barely got out of bed, but you were in bed with a beloved stranger. To get what we most want and can't explain, we have to outlast passion, which is wonderful, easy and necessarily temporary. We have to be really ourselves, and let ourselves be really known - which is a terrifying thing to do, involving the gradual breaking down of all our psychological defences, the willingness to be exposed as vulnerable and less than perfect.

The American psychologist Robert Firestone has spent decades counselling couples at his 'living laboratory', where he gets them to act out scenarios from their relationships. It's our fear of exposing ourselves, of letting ourselves be known and accepting someone else's love that breaks up more couples than anything else, he says. It takes time. Rather a long time, as a matter of fact, because it is so terrifying, and because we're always evolving and discovering new things. But if you can do it, and gradually peel away the layers, and you find that you've been seen naked, and you're not only known but accepted, and not only accepted but loved, as you really are...

It's hard to imagine that anything will feel better than those three days in Paris, and maybe nothing will, except those 30 years of day-in, day-out rowing and making up, going on and off each other, gradually growing around each other like old trees.

But nearly half of all marriages don't get to that stage. We bail out. We are discouraged, disheartened and disappointed. Or just bored. And so we assume that everyone else must be, too, so they're just putting up with an inferior state while we are the brave ones, escaping over the wall. Divorce is a fabulous thing. There could be no promise of emotionally fulfilling marriage without it, and leaving a relationship is often the best thing for it. But just like they're always saying at Relate, you can bail out too quickly.

When marriage mutated from the purely economic institution of the Middle Ages to the purely psychological institution of today, its potential for happiness and fulfilment was matched only by the burden of expectation. We want our relationships to be everything: physically exciting, emotionally fulfilling, familiarly stable, mutually nourishing. I'm no expert, but let me give you one piece of wisdom that I know to be entirely true, and which may save your marriage some day: no one person can give you all that. No one person can ever be all things to another. You need friends, interests, work, family. Sometimes you may even need other lovers. My own forecast for the future of relationships is not that we'll become a nation of singletons, but that we'll reinvent marriages. Just as we make 'families of friends', so we'll re-write the rules on relationships to make them less private, less exclusive and less pressured. Some people are already experimenting with community living, while others are naturally fluid as steps, exes and halves come and go. Instead of worrying about the new model family, we should celebrate and support it - the stifling conformity and prescriptive nature of 'marriage' is what kills it, and lends it its capacity to corrode rather than nourish.

Accepting this from the get up and go relieves you of the romantic myth of the other half, and lets you accept the other fundamental truth about marriages: they go in cycles. In her far-reaching study of marriage, Linda Waite surveyed husbands and wives who described themselves as 'quite unhappy' in their marriage. Five years later she went back and surveyed them again. A small proportion had divorced, but most now described themselves as 'much happier'. 'Just as a good marriage can go bad, a bad marriage can go good,' she says. Ups and downs are part of the rhythm of long-term relationships. So do something else for a while. Concentrate on work, or go out more with your friends. Or try harder, talk more and be nicer. Or scream and throw plates and get it off your chest. Whatever works.

It's a fact that anything worth having is hard, and anything that takes years to build - like a career, or a relationship, or a family - involves long, unexciting periods of just putting one foot in front of the other. It seems odd to me that we accept that about everything else except relationships. Just as we accept the fact that we have to compromise, apologise when we don't mean it and make all kinds of concessions for our friends and 'urban families', if we do the same with our partners we've sold our souls to Stepford. Marriage is a decision to experience all of life - not edited highlights - with someone else. For better or worse, in sickness or health, in-laws and Waitrose rotas, loyalty, support and love that lasts, until death us do part.

And the wheel keeps turning. 'Happy long-term couples tend to describe themselves as "the kind who don't quit easily",' says Penny Mansfield, 'or they're good at having other things in their life, so their focus isn't always and only on their relationship.' And some of the happiest couples have been miserable as sin. One couple I know almost broke up when their children left home, but worked it out and are happier than ever now. 'I nearly went,' she says thoughtfully, 'but the thought of being at our children's weddings with other partners who'd had nothing to do with the previous 25 years of child-raising seemed tragic.'

When Penny Mansfield interviewed married couples about what they valued in their marriages, they talked about the tough times and the unimaginable value of having someone else to go through them with: 'When I got into trouble with the police, I thought she'd leave. When she didn't, when she stood by me, I can't describe it. I'll never put that at risk again.' Or, 'When I lost the baby, he was with me all the time, for months and months, helping me through it.'

This combination of deep love and dogged hanging in there, with the daily repetition of dreary old domestics adds an element to coupledom that nobody talks about. In a secular age, our relationships can embody the spiritual dimensions of our lives. Living our values and beliefs, the day-in, day-out performance of small services for our partners and families, the fulfilment of duty and responsibility and the slow and certain getting and giving of love rewards us boring old couples, just occasionally, with transcendence.

Couples stand accused of everything from dullness to evil. From Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections to the Jaggers' divorce via Eminem and The Hours, marriage is portrayed as nasty, corrosive and suffocating. Happy marriages don't make it into blockbuster movies or soap operas, except as grotesques. Keeping faith with long-term love is hard to do. But let me ask you this: imagine a world free of marriage or commitment. We each live as we please, with no pain or responsibility for anyone but ourselves. Now, does that world look better or worse?

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKyYmryjv8SrrZ6qX2d9cX%2BOmqerZ2JlfKexwK2sq52jY7qis8CzoKedYmw%3D