Whatever your views about David Cameron's politics, standing on the steps of No 10 last month with his wife the new prime minister provided an authentic advertisement for the joys of marriage. As Sam Cam waved nervously to the crowds, Cameron buried his face into her shoulder and gave her a reassuring shake. It was a spontaneous gesture of togetherness, so very tender, loving and real – and so unlike anything we had ever seen from Gordon Brown.
Cameron's body language with his wife has always spoken volumes: their long history; his clear devotion (that of a man who still can't quite believe his luck); the shared experience of raising a family; and the life-shaping devastation of losing their disabled child. It is hardly surprising he wants more of us to get married, albeit with the paltry tax bribe of £150 a year. He is doing well on it. "I don't preach about people's lives," said his chancellor George Osborne, himself married with young children, "and many marriages fail, but I think we know now from years of evidence that a society where more people are married is a stronger society."
Although both Labour and the Liberal Democrats refused to favour marriage over cohabiting – ironically, given the nature of the coalition to come – that did not stop Labour from echoing the social conservatism line ("Marriage is a really important institution in our society for bringing up children," said Ed Balls. And Gordon Brown: "I am a believer in marriage, and the institution of marriage is absolutely central and fundamental to our society"). The Lib Dems, meanwhile, vociferously condemned the tax break as "patronising" and "sending all the wrong signals", recognising the anachronism in incentivising an institution that is increasingly becoming a minority pursuit.
With the recent assurance from Nick Clegg that his party will abstain on a vote on the marriage tax – and what a concession that is – Cameron will now get his marriage tax break through. But will it, as he hopes, make things any better? Will more people get married as a result? Will we all be happier?
Despite the anecdotal evidence – such as a recent survey for More magazine, which revealed that the majority of the 2,000 polled (women in their mid-20s) would like to be married by the age of 26 – figures released by the Office of National Statistics in February show that in 2008 the number of marriages registered was 232,990, the lowest in England and Wales since 1895. In the past 30 years, the number of marriages conducted annually has fallen by a third. It is true that divorce rates are down to a 29-year low, but that, statisticians say, is because fewer people are getting married, and those who do are more committed to staying together. Demography experts predict that within the next five years the majority of British babies will be born to unmarried parents. If marriage is "absolutely central and fundamental to our society", why don't so many of us want to do it any more?
Whenever marriage is talked about, it is always in sentiments of gravity, happiness, certainty and long-term commitment. Research also suggests it makes you richer, healthier and your children more successful. For example, in a project carried out at Warwick University in 2002, called "Does Marriage Affect Physical and Psychological Health: a Study of Longitudinal Evidence", academics found that, in material terms, a happy marriage was equivalent to an annual income of £70,000. In health terms, it has the equivalent impact of giving up smoking.
None of us wants to die alone and most of us, if honest, strive for a life of private intimacy with someone – the kind Karl Marx meant when he asked his wife in 1856: "But where could I find a face whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life?"
Statistically, at least, marriage seems to be the best way of ensuring this. Research conducted by Kathleen Kiernan, professor of social policy and demography at the University of York, shows that couples who cohabit but do not marry are two-and-a-half times more likely to split up than married couples. It is not the marriage certificate itself, she stresses, that keep such couples and families together, but the attitudes of the people involved and how they view their commitment.
In my own case, there was enough of the traditionalist in both my husband and me to want to make a bigger statement. Why did we feel that to be necessary? For me, it was more an emotional pull towards family belonging – by the time we married I was pregnant with our second child – than anything to do with conservative morality. Would getting married make our family more likely to stick together?
Apparently so. My instinctive emotional feelings will act as the glue that binds my family together: "The kinds of people selecting into marriage create better family environments," Professor Kiernan says, "but that's nothing to do with 'marriage' – that's to do with the people involved and how they view their commitment."
Given that there is so much divorce, and so few marriages now, how can marriage bring more happiness? In Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage, the follow-up to her international bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert tries to answer why we make such a hash of it. She uncovers sobering facts about what sociologists call the "marriage benefit imbalance", showing that marriage is an institution that greatly benefits men, not women. A partial list: married men live longer than single men; married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men, and married men suffer less alcoholism, drug addiction and depression than single men. So David Cameron is doing well for a reason. But married women versus single? There's more depression, less career success and less good health in married women and, until recently, a greater chance of dying a violent death – usually at the hands of the men they love.
Only last month another study came out of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany which showed that women who are seven to nine years older than their husbands have a 20% higher mortality rate than if they were the same age. Marrying an older man shortens a woman's life span, but having a young husband reduces it even more, the study found. Reasons were unclear, but some explanations might lie in the quality of friendships men and women form throughout their life. Women, goes the argument, have more close friendships outside marriage and so benefit less than men from having a partner. There could be another reason, too.
I grew up the product of a "model" family, with two parents and a mother who stayed at home. My sister and I were healthy, happy, educated and stable. But my mother did not work beyond meeting the needs of her family. Today, modern women are subjected to a whole new set of strains, juggling multiple issues of children, home, work, love and sex. They are the emotional architects of a family life that is far more complex now.
As Gilbert asks in Committed, when politicians start talking about "ideal" family environments, can we have "a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape the walls of their souls bare to do it?"
The assertion that marriage makes you happier and healthier is more controversial than ever. In the past decade, clinical trials in America have proven that, whatever your sex, ending up in a bad marriage, or even in a marriage in which marital stress is high, has effects on your health beyond the psychological. Being married is only good for you if it's a good marriage. In one study in Ohio, immunologist Ronald Glaser and his wife, clinical psychologist Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, recruited 76 women, half of whom were married and half divorced or separated. Using blood tests to measure the women's production of antibodies, they found the immune systems were decidedly weaker in women who were either unhappily married or emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands.
They followed this through with a study of 90 newlyweds who were made to sit face to face discussing "volatile" subjects such as housework, sex or in-laws. Many of the seemingly happy couples quickly descended into hostile behaviour, and in these couples the scientists found the largest declines in immune-system function over the 24-hour period. Fascinated by the implications, Kiecolt-Glaser went even further. She had read about a strange tool – a small plastic suction device – used by her dermatology colleagues which left eight small blisters when used on the arm. Forty-two couples had their arms "blistered", then talked to each other for half an hour, the first time on easy subjects, then the following day, after more blistering, on topics that might create a row. Kiecolt-Glaser found that after the episodes in which the couples bickered, the blisters took a day longer to heal and in the couples in which the bickering was particularly nasty, the wounds took a full two days longer than that.
The message was clear: if you fight with a loved one, it isn't only bad for your relationship, but bad for your body. Kiecolt-Glaser was unequivocal: "Learn to fight without hostility and derision, but if staying married means constantly fighting, from the point of view of your health, you're better off out of it."
Stephanie Coontz, the author of Marriage, A History, says that the findings teach us that: "It is the relationship, not the institution, that is the key." She also raises other questions surrounding how, as a society, we have managed to end up in a position in which marital breakdown now costs £24bn a year: "Historically it wasn't until the late 1800s that it only became respectable to marry for love," she tells me. "When the love revolution happened, social conservatives were horrified because of the rights people would demand of it as a result – in other words, if people married for love, they would want to stay in love. It took 150 years for social conservative fears to play out, largely because of lack of birth control and the stigma of illegitimacy."
In other words, it has taken 150 years for people to work out that if they marry for love and then fall out of love, they don't have to be married any more. "I'm not saying we have to lower our expectations of marriage," Coontz continues. "But the romance is only one part of the love. I prefer to think of it as a day-to-day repair of a bridge constantly in construction. It is precisely because now, culturally, we marry for love that you can not expect love alone to carry you. In the past we never did. When a marriage works today, it works better than at any point in history, but when it is bad, it is so much less bearable. I'm not sure how you stop that except to understand it and what is required to keep it going."
Kate Figes is author of the recently published and critically acclaimed Couples: The Truth, which is based on 120 interviews with "committed" couples. The book explores the reality of modern love and is incisive on how, culturally, societal change has made it difficult for us all and has contributed to a feeling that marriage is to be avoided, or must be abandoned at the first hurdle. "It feels in some ways that society is 15 years behind the nature of our relationships," she tells me. "We really are the pioneers. It is hardly surprising that there is divorce and depression. The traditional assumptions of father and mother are disappearing – men want more emotional involvement; women want to work – few can survive on the father's salary alone. Women have to return to work, and yet workplace attitudes and practices have not shifted adequately enough to accommodate the new needs of families. Families live too far away. It's parents who bear the brunt of this seismic change, with no route map to tell them how to be a 'happy' family any more as they grapple towards a new way of being which sort of works – on a good day."
What is more, Figes says, few are really honest about how damn tough being in a long-term relationship is. For many reasons – anything from loyalty, shame, pride – we rarely confide any more, not with our friends, not with our family, and so go about our business thinking everybody else's relationship is better until we can no longer bear our own. The truth is that it's hard for us all. It is not the benefits of "marriage" we need to be told about, or even guided towards with a paltry sum of money each year that is barely enough to do one weekly shop, but the skills of ensuring enduring commitment. Friends need to talk about the bad times as well as the good times so that we all don't end up living in a bubble of expectation.
It is here, perhaps, that I should declare an interest. During my talks with Figes I tell her that for so many people entering marriage – including me, first time round – they have no real idea what it truly means. I got married at 27, after six years of happy cohabitation. By the age of 30, I was divorced, scarred by the failure of it all (no children, crucially). My wedding five years ago to the man who is now my husband was my second (37% of the marriages recorded in 2008 were remarriages, a fall of 4% in 10 years). The failure of my first marriage was not enough to put me off doing it again, although second time round I thought long and hard about what it really meant. Today I am very happy, although it is by no means always easy. I think Elizabeth Gilbert gets somewhere close to it when she quotes Kant in his assertion that we humans are so emotionally complex that we go through two puberties in life: the first when our bodies are mature enough for sex, and the second when our minds are. "I do wonder if perhaps our emotional maturity comes to us only through the experiences and lessons of our youthful and romantic failures," she writes. "To ask a 20-year-old girl to somehow automatically know things about life that most 40-year-old women needed decades to understand is expecting an awful lot of wisdom from a very young person. Maybe we must all go through the anguish and errors of a first puberty, in other words, before any of us can ascend to the second one."
Figes points to Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving: "Loving is an art, just as living is an art," he writes. "If we want to learn how to love, we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, carpentry or the art of medicine or engineering."
What Figes learned, she says, echoes Coontz's thesis: a good marriage today – for its freedoms and equalities – makes you happy, a bad one desperately miserable and with feelings of unbearable loneliness. The message seems to be that, rather than blindly encouraging a society into marriage only to find unhappiness a few years down the line, we should widen the discussion – even start the discussion – about what it takes to keep a marriage or "commitment" going. As Tara Parker-Pope discovers in her book For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage, "the goal is to diagnose and treat marital problems just as a doctor would diagnose and treat cancer, diabetes or any other important health concern."
"One of the most shocking things for me that came out of my research," continues Figes, "was that it takes six years for a couple to get to marriage counselling, and by then it can be too late." Happiness, she says, lies in the small things, the daily kindnesses and courtesies, the shared and growing sense of history, not going nuclear in arguments with cruel insults. There's no hidden secret.
Inevitably in any discussion of the value of marriage, the issue of the health and wellbeing of children comes up. Children, the research seems to suggest, are happier and perform better academically with two parents. The Centre for Social Justice, Cameron's think-tank that was responsible for recommending the proposed marriage tax break, has issued some stark statistics on child welfare and family breakdown. Original YouGov polling for their report, Breakdown Britain, revealed that children whose parents were no longer together were 75% more likely to fail at school, 70% more likely be drug addicts and 50% more likely to have alcohol problems. The centre also used Professor Kiernan's research showing that couples whose children were born outside wedlock were two-and-a-half times more likely to split up than those couples who got married first (statistically, then, my second marriage is more likely to break up given we'd already started our family). "Crossing the line and making the commitment makes a big difference to stability," said Dr Samantha Callan, the centre's chair of Family, Early Years and Mental Health.
But really, I ask her, a £150-a-year bribe? Is that all you could come up with? As JK Rowling said at the time of the announcement, it's no good saying, "It's the message, not the money", because for single women trying to bring up children – surely the ones who need help most – it is always about the money. "Look, firstly, when we made the recommendations in Breakthrough Britain we were asking for the couple to get the full tax break – that's £20 extra a week, not the £3 it has been reduced to now because of all the fiscal problems that have happened since. It was never meant as a bribe. Aspirations for marriage are solid, but our abilities to realise them are very different. There is a real cultural battle going on. You are disadvantaged in the tax credits if you are a couple. That is a system which is actually working against the kids having two parents around."
But Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, a book that has influenced policy makers across the three parties, including our new prime minister, is clear that at an international level there is no link between child wellbeing and being the child of a lone parent. In the latest edition of The Spirit Level, she and co-author Richard Wilkinson use the Unicef index of child wellbeing, which measures around 40 different elements, from immunisation to the presence of bullying, to illustrate that: "There is no connection between the proportion of single parents and the national standards of child wellbeing. This, however, contrasts sharply with the strong relationship between child wellbeing and income inequality."
They found that in countries that provided state support to protect single-parent families from poverty, the children's wellbeing was unaffected as measured by the index. What really blighted children's lives, they found, was having a mother who was depressed or a life shaped by poverty – in other words, a mother who was unable to give them emotional stability and where living conditions were equally unstable. "It is quite clearly completely unrelated to whether the parents are single or not," Pickett confirms when we speak. "Given the political controversies around the provision of state support to single parents, two points are worth noting. First, that it seems to be possible to safeguard children against most of the adverse effects of being brought up by lone parents, and second, that denying state support does not seem to reduce the proportion of single parents." A top-heavy, unequal society with extremes of wealth and poverty is what really threatens child welfare, not children born out of wedlock.
What makes all this confusing is that everybody broadly agrees that children do do better with two parents, and that in the UK our "unions" – whether marriages or partnerships – are more likely to break up than anywhere else in Europe. There is no doubt that divorce can leave lingering psychological scars, especially on children. But equally, as Figes points out, the damage of divorce on children can be mitigated by careful handling. The bottom line of the research into parenting and relationships is that the best way to take care of your children is to take care of your marriage. Which brings us back to square one: "Moments of intense frustration, hatred, loneliness and irritation exist in every long-term relationship," Figes states, "but when the whole is sound, when there is enough love and respect to keep things moving forward together, a committed relationship offers us the best crucible there is for psychological growth, contentment and a sense of self and place."
So where does that leave us on the marriage question? Well, if you try and fail, it will bring you more misery than almost anything else at any point in history. But if you can move beyond overblown feelings of romance (nice while they last), invest in daily kindnesses and see it as a difficult journey rather than an instant hit of sexual and emotional gratification, your life and the lives of your children will have a better chance of being happier. Are you prepared to take the gamble?
Marriage: the facts
The Mohegan Sun casino's 17ft high wedding cake weighed 15,032lb and produced 59,000 slices.
Glynn Wolfe, who also holds the record for the most divorces, married 29 times during his 88 years. His shortest union lasted 19 days; his longest one seven years. His first marriage was in 1926, and his last was in 1996, to Linda Essex, who held the record for female with the most marriages.
Françoise Frenandez and Madeleine Francineau married in 2002 at a retirement home in France when the two were 96 and 94.
Vanisha Mittal, daughter of the world's fifth richest person, married investment banker Amid Bhatia in Versailles. The six-day party, which included a performance by Kylie Minogue, reportedly cost $55 million.