One way or another in life, we end up making choices, even if we think we’re choosing not to choose. The choice not to marry, to live with someone instead, is one example. Passing on the public commitment and going for sex plus domesticity is a choice, one in which, I imagine, the absence of commitment is part of the appeal. You don’t fancy the for-better-or-worse stuff, the Waterford glass wedding presents, the joint pension provision? Well, that’s just dandy, but complaining that you don’t have the perks of matrimony when your open-ended arrangement breaks up does seem to be trying to have it both ways.
And having it both ways is precisely what the government seems to want to encourage. It’s launching a consultation on giving greater rights to cohabitees. We all know, don’t we, what a consultation entails? It means going through the motions to arrive at the conclusions that you’ve already come to.
Labour has a manifesto commitment to reform the situation for cohabitees, especially women, in the event of the relationship breaking down, so we know where this is heading. At present, if you’ve been living with someone, you don’t have an automatic right to their property or their pension if he or she dies without a will or if you separate. You can claim for child support if there are children, but ownership of property is less clear cut than for married couples. Mind you, in Ireland I know of women who keep the house after separating on account of their children, even though the children may not be related to him.
In the Netherlands, cohabiters can claim much the same rights as married people, but you do have to register the relationship. And I imagine that’s a bit of a ball and chain – I mean, how do you preserve the illusion of perfect freedom when you’ve got to troop to the town hall to make the affair official? You may as well get married.
There are potentially an awful lot of people affected by this alleged reform – around 3.6 million couples in 2021, so probably more now. It’s not clear that Labour envisages people having to register in order to qualify for the new rights, so the status of the relationship would be for the courts to decide.
It all has a bearing on the primal relationship, the foundation of society, which is marriage, and less than half the adult population was married in 2022. As most of us know, a relationship that comes with a public commitment is better for children. The Centre for Policy Studies spelled it out in a report by Cristina Odone five years ago, and its conclusion still holds:
‘Married parents are twice as likely to stay together as cohabiting ones. By the time they turn five, 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents will have experienced their parents’ separation; among five-year-olds with married parents, this is 15 per cent… Even when controlling for income and education, children raised in unstable families suffer worse health, are more likely to be excluded, more likely to join a gang and end up as NEET.’
Would that situation change if cohabitees got more rights when there’s a separation? It might mean that children would be better provided for. But it may also mean that people will be even less likely to marry, less likely to commit, and less likely to stay together, if they think they’ll be looked after outside marriage – which is sub-optimal for the children.
Even for childless couples there’s something fundamentally odd about treating the unmarried the same as the married given they’ve decided not to commit. If the individuals concerned are grown up, they know there are consequences to sticking with an irregular union rather than making an honest wo/man of the other party.
The benefits of marriage, if this reform is enacted, will look even less obvious. Granted the Tories presided over the rot when they opted for no-fault divorce three years ago, a patently dishonest outcome, even in cases where it’s obvious to everyone that one party was at fault.
This reform will undermine an already rackety institution further. The government should be trying to make marriage look like the normal, grownup, regular, respectable thing to do, not rewarding what, in happier days, we called living in sin.
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