Jemima Lewis: Don't be fooled... most women want marriage

If David Cameron is right, and marriage is the key to building a "decent" society, we'd better brace ourselves for Gomorrah. Official figures published yesterday show that the number of British couples tying the knot has fallen to an all-time low. There were 244,710 weddings in England and Wales in 2005 - a 10 per cent drop on the previous year, and the sharpest peacetime decline since records began more than a century ago.

All the usual vested interests have scuttled forward to proffer an explanation: modern women are too busy working; men are scared of having to pay huge alimony settlements if it goes pear-shaped; the tax system penalises marriage. The Office of National Statistics says it's mostly just a blip caused by a government crackdown on sham marriages for illegal immigrants, but the gloom-mongers reply that this just proves that the real rate of marriage has been artificially inflated for years.

I would agree with Cameron that marriage - or more to the point, the lasting, contented marriage - is worth saving. We don't need surveys to tell us that children thrive when their parents are happily contained under one roof, and suffer miserably when they are not.

I can still remember the creeping horror I felt when, some time in primary school, my friends' parents started to divorce. Never mind that my own mum and dad seemed entirely cheerful together: the realisation that such a cataclysm was even possible shifted the tectonic plates of my infant world, opening up the first real fissure of anxiety.

It was perhaps a mistake to turn to my grandmother, the most resolute of pessimists, for reassurance. "Your parents' marriage," she declared, "is on the rocks."

Thirty years later, I am grateful to them for proving her wrong. There is an extraordinary comfort in growing up with two people doing their best to love each other unconditionally. Unlike parental love, with its biological imperative, marital love is founded on the most fragile of bonds - a mere promise. This, apart from anything else, is good for a child to see: that people are capable of keeping their word.

But marketing marriage as "good for the children" is perhaps not the best way to sell it to today's twenty- and thirty-somethings. We are a selfish breed, raised according to the doctrine of personal fulfilment. We regard the dutiful domesticity of past generations with a sort of nostalgic awe, much as we might the valour of a Viking warrior. We are not accustomed to doing things for the benefit of others.

If marriage is to survive in this onanistic age, it must be presented as a pleasure, not a virtue. Men, in particular, need to be convinced. The decline in marriage is generally blamed on women, who, having stormed the workplace and won their financial independence, no longer have the inclination to take a spouse. This, like all the most convincing lies, is based in a half-truth.

It is easier to be picky when your survival doesn't depend on finding a mate. It is easier to enjoy spinsterhood when you have money and friends and social status. And it is much easier to be a single mother when you know you won't be bundled off to the workhouse.

But to suggest that women are no longer tempted by marriage is wilfully wrong-headed. If anything, we are dreamier about it, thirstier for it, than ever before. It is the magic ingredient of rom-coms and chick-lit, the subject of countless magazine articles, the thwarted longing that drives the bulk of the self-help industry. If Bridget Jones had been single and perfectly content, she would have been of no interest to anyone: it was her desperation, not her liberation, that rang bells with her peers.

Women - and indeed girls - have become accomplished at feigning a lack of interest in commitment; we know that it scares men witless. But I'll wager there is hardly a single mother or high-powered spinster in the country who doesn't wish she had a mate. It is a horrible affliction, this primordial need to be part of a pair - especially when the other half of the population doesn't appear to share it.

Men used to marry at the first opportunity because it was the only way to ensure a regular supply of free sex. There were nobler reasons too, of course: love, duty, chivalry. But it was sex that made it an urgent necessity. Today, that incentive has vanished completely. All that remains is a faint trace, a will-o-the-wisp, in the form of dating protocol: we are advised not to sleep with a suitor until the third date, by which time he will be hooked. A likely story.

The easy availability of sex means that most men don't fancy getting tied down in their 20s or early 30s. Eventually, as their libido wanes and their waistline waxes, they start to see sense. They suddenly want a family, stability, the intoxication of true intimacy - by which time the women of their own age are running out of eggs.

The country is full of wannabe brides. It is men who are bringing down marriage.

jemima.lewis@virgin.net

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