Don't throw the arsenic and old tea away just yet Head Head

AT LONG last, someone has noticed: more and more people are turning their backs on marriage. Two out of five marriages end in divorce, often to the great relief of both parties - a reaction which is beginning to be recognised by greetings card companies and night-club owners. I recently spotted, from the window of a taxi in Edinburgh, a sign advertising a venue for divorce parties. This development may raise questions of etiquette, whether or not to invite the spouse you have just cheerfully discarded being the most obvious, but these are minor details. The mystery is that it has taken so long for an influential body - the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), in a report issued last week - to recognise the decline of confidence in marriage instead of coming up with hopeless schemes to keep people together.

This is something of a lost cause, as governments would admit if they were honest. You can't make divorce too difficult, or disillusioned spouses will start soaking arsenic off the wallpaper and tipping it into their partners' tea, as they did in the 19th century. Nor can you coerce women to stay in unhappy or violent marriages, except by taking away their jobs and state benefits (although, come to think of it, New Labour seems to be working on that). Admittedly, this isn't quite how the IPPR framed the background to its report, which advocates a "child commitment ceremony" to keep unmarried fathers in touch with their children. And I'm not convinced that getting new fathers to make soupy vows when the child's birth is registered, confirming their "love and dedication", is the answer I'm looking for.

But at least the IPPR has acknowledged that Britain's brief experiment with state regulation of heterosexual relationships has failed. Anyone would think, to hear government ministers and bishops talk, that marriage as we know it is an ancient institution whose origins are lost in the mists of time. Yet the present form dates back only to 1753, when Lord Hardwicke steered an act through Parliament to give the State control over the way in which people lived together and had children. Aristocratic families were worried about their heirs contracting clandestine marriages, while the lower orders frequently favoured a relaxed arrangement in which a couple simply announced they were man and wife. The result in both cases was squabbles over property and the purpose of the act was to ensure, in future, its orderly transmission from one generation to the next.

How this frankly mercenary piece of legislation ever came to get mixed up with morality, or romantic love, is another of life's little puzzles. But the sensible course in 1998 is to accept that marriage has become an optional exercise for consenting adults and to start discussing reforms, such as giving unmarried fathers the same rights as mothers, which will ease the impact of serial relationships on children. We don't have the answers yet but at least we're talking.

BY COINCIDENCE - at least I think it's coincidence - last week was a terrible advertisement for marriage. A husband went to prison for life after burning his wife to death in a guest house in Wales for her insurance money. The doomed love affair between a married TV presenter and her lover, who returned to his wife, was splashed all over the tabloids. A court martial in Guildford revealed extra-marital affairs among high-ranking officers in the armed forces. It used to be the case that you had to be moderately famous to have your sexual history bandied about in public, but this rule has clearly fallen into abeyance. I once flicked through a book called Sex Lives of the Famous and it concentrated on characters like Napoleon and Josephine, not the intimacy - or lack of it - between an insipid woman who reads out lottery numbers on BBC 1 and a former Radio 1 DJ. (Thanks here to the Guardian, which revealed that Anthea Turner and Peter Powell haven't slept together for two years.)

What hasn't changed is the unbalanced way in which these mesalliances are reported. Lieutenant- Colonel Keith Pople has been charged with scandalous conduct unbecoming an officer, and conduct to the prejudice of good order, after he admitted an affair with a senior Wren, Lieutenant-Commander Karen Pearce. You may think this is a heavy-handed way to deal with the problem of relationships at work, which is the issue raised by the case, but the striking thing about the press coverage is the way in which it gave the impression that Lt-Cdr Pearce, who has not been charged with anything, is on trial.

The Daily Telegraph reported that Lt-Col Pople was "completely devastated" when his lover "confessed to making love with another officer on board the carrier Illustrious". Lt-Cdr Pearce's love-making was so noisy, the paper claimed, that she and her new lover had to take care not to give themselves away to colleagues, prompting the memorable headline: "The safest time to have sex on Illustrious was when the Harrier jump jets were flying". Lt-Cdr Pearce's failure to lie back and think quietly of England excited the Telegraph so much that the charges against Lt-Col Pople were not mentioned until the tenth paragraph. On the same page, another report of the court martial described Lt-Col Pople's attempts to tell his lover's friends "what sort of woman" she was when their affair ended.

The headline, "I warned friends she wrecked marriages", was put in quotes but there can be little doubt that the reputation of Lt-Cdr Pearce, not to mention her career, has suffered irreparable damage. Like the women accused in December of infecting soldiers at an army camp with HIV, she is a victim of senior officers' reluctance to abandon old notions about men's vulnerability to women's predatory sexuality, aided and abetted by flagrantly biased reporting. On occasions like this, it occurs to me that Eve got off lightly. These days, the Garden of Eden would be mobbed by reporters, desperate to get the serpent's side of the story. Did her teeth crunch when she ate the apple?

IN VIEW of the above, there's just one thing I'd like to point out. The fact that my house is directly under the Heathrow flight path in West London, with jumbo jets roaring overhead every couple of minutes is entirely coincidental. Happy Easter.