Weddings are fashionable, but not necessary

How telling it is that the Lords should have decided to scupper the government Bill which aims to extend adoption rights to couples who aren't married. Yet when the high-minded peer, Baroness O'Cathain, began her campaign to deny cohabiting heterosexual and homosexual couples the right to adopt, she could hardly have guessed that she had chosen such a timely moment to start arguing for the importance of marriage. Because even voices on the Left have started to chorus that marriage is back in fashion.

A survey published earlier this week found that nearly half of the women who were polled thought that marriage is now becoming more fashionable. And that view is supported by the statistics; the number of marriages in 2000 showed a slight rise for the first time in nearly a decade.

Over the past 11 years that I have spent in what the Government would, horribly, call stable cohabitation, the pressure on unmarried couples to do the conventional thing has only increased. It's hardly surprising to hear that the numbers of people getting married has now started to go up. In a way, it's more surprising that so many still resist the notion, trotted out by anyone from Helen Fielding to the Bishop of Winchester, that true happiness is only attainable after buying a couple of rings and slicing through a tiered cake.

In such a climate, although the Lords are being called homophobic because they are denying rights to gay couples, no one seems very bothered about the prospect of denying rights to unmarried people. After all, it is now always assumed that cohabiting relationships must be less stable than married relationships. Yet the crude statistics on the stability of relationships tell us little. Obviously some cohabiting couples know full well that they are just passing through one anothers' lives, while others know that they have made a real commitment to one another, and yet they all look the same to the statistician.

But if a couple has decided to try to seek adoption together, they must feel as sure about their future as any couple who once stood up before the registrar. Who would deny the possibility that such an unmarried couple could make a stable home? The pragmatic matter of who can give a child a decent home was less important to the peers than their own moral fervour. As one bishop fulminated, allowing equal rights to unmarried couples "would destroy a precious eco-system on which the security, maturity, well-being and wholesomeness not only of countless individuals but of our society, now and in the future, depends." One commentator said yesterday that those who support adoption by cohabiting couples only do so to "justify their own louche lifestyles" or "to expunge some terrible hatred buried deep in their own childhoods".

Few people who denigrate unmarried relationships deploy such absurd rhetoric. But even liberals now often tend to assume that cohabitation must be second best. In the past, living together outside marriage was seen by liberals as a definite choice, as a rebellious stance, whereas now it is usually seen as mere laziness, as a pale imitation of the real thing. Now, if you state that you're not married, people tend to assume that you are just working up to it, and that at some point, when you've got the right words out of your partner, you will be sending out invitations to a grand do – all the grander, in fact, for the long wait.

No doubt many unmarried couples are just working up to it, and there are all sorts of other negative reasons why people never get to the ring-and-cake stage. There are the grumps who don't like each others' parents, and the cynics who are pretending to be committed but are still waiting for something better to come along. But for so many others the decision to love without marriage is not a negative, but a positive choice. Some unmarried couples are dreamers who see their relationship as a series of starry moments rather than a conventional progression marked by a conventional wedding party. Some are old-fashioned rebels, who feel that a certificate from the state has little to do with their personal lives. Some are idealists who dislike the expensive show of a smart wedding, and would rather whisper their commitment to one another on a windswept hillside. Some are romantics who feel that they have already made such a supreme commitment to one another in their hearts that they don't need any ceremony to keep it that way.

For so many people, unmarried partnership is not a second best. But because the idea that relationships outside marriage can be just as romantic, just as faithful, just as lasting as marriage, is rarely aired with any conviction, the consensus seems to be growing again that durable relationships should always be based on a marriage certificate.

Feminists have made less headway here than their critics would suggest. For women, the selling of the dream still starts young. Feminist as I am, I still read all those seductive fables like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty to my two-year-old daughter in the evenings, and I note that while the modern editions that she was given for her birthday have dispensed with the phrase "happily ever after" they would never dispense with the final proposal of marriage. Our grown-up versions of Cinderella are a little more tongue in cheek, but no less conventional; from the OK magazine wedding specials to all those shiny bestsellers that centre on the hunt for a husband.

Even in this generation in which women are feeling more independent than ever before, so many women still fall for the idea that marriage is necessary to assure them of their own desirability and their future security. Indeed, in the tabloids' view of relationships, love seems to have become a sort of kiss chase, with the girls chasing the boys to the altar – or into Hello magazine. Yesterday, for instance, the cover of a tabloid newspaper showed Sven-Goran Eriksson's girlfriend Nancy Dell'Olio sporting a huge ring on her engagement finger. No matter about his very public romps, this was still seen as a mark of success for poor Nancy.

The growing interest that this generation is showing in old-fashioned weddings is presumably a sign of a growing desire for more social cohesion and family stability. But where families are breaking down, it isn't because the parents have failed to get to the altar in time. Where a wedding is used as a kind of sticking-plaster, bonded over relationships in the hope that it will keep the partners together, it is bound to fail. Surely, if we are serious about wanting to preserve, as the bishop put it, the "precious eco-system" of family life on which our "security and well-being" depend, we would make rather less fuss about the difference between unmarried and married couples and take more interest in their similarities, and their similar needs.

After all, this week's poll that found such strong support for the idea that weddings were becoming more fashionable still found that most people did not think that weddings were particularly important to family life. When asked if unmarried fathers should have the same rights and responsibilities as married fathers, for instance, more than 90 per cent believed they should. And that, I think, gives both a more realistic and a more hopeful idea of the future of family life than the picture painted for us by the furious peers.

n.walter@btinternet.com