It's falling in popularity but being married is brilliant – try it

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/04/its-falling-in-popularity-but-being-married-is-brilliant-try-it

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I stand before you as an emissary for a cool and obscure minority. You see, I am one of a dying breed. I am married. Statistically, nobody else in the country is married. Not even my wife.

Marriage between opposite-sex couples has fallen to an all-time low. The Office for National Statistics has revealed that just 239,020 marriages took place in 2015, almost half the number that took place in 1940, and people are in uproar about it. “Britain already languishes in shame at the bottom of the developed world league table for family stability,” said a spokesperson from the Marriage Foundation, which is apparently a thing, on hearing the news.

Worse still, the age of people getting married is also increasing. The average newlywed is now 36 years old, which means that marriage has become a solidly middle-aged activity. The only people who get married any more are people who enjoy laughing at Jeremy Vine’s radio programme while driving their Volvo to Homebase. I haven’t researched this, but I’m certain that most wedding lists now just contain requests for Werthers Originals and vouchers for a Bupa hip replacement.

It doesn’t have to be this way. From personal experience, I can assure you that being married is fantastic. I have now been married for three-and-a-half years, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so content. I feel like part of a team. We have weathered a lot in the past few years. Too much, even – all manner of births and fires and illnesses and deaths that have frazzled us beyond words – but at least we have weathered them together. At best, we’ve formed a bond that will last an eternity. At worst, we have made it financially inconvenient to leave each other if we get too fed up. What’s not to love?

Of course, you’ll notice that I said “being married” in that last paragraph and not “getting married”. Getting married is the worst. Weddings are awful. Planning and executing a wedding is like doing a terrible version of The Krypton Factor, where every obstacle is designed to part you from as much money as possible. When you get engaged, you want to share your happy day with all the people you love. But by the time you actually get married, those people have transformed into walking piles of cash that you wish you had never spent. Also, at least in my experience, you’ll often find that many of your partner’s coworkers will gatecrash your reception and drive the venue’s capacity far above its fire safety limit, and as a result you’ll spend the rest of your life harbouring a simmering resentment for their employer. Frankly, weddings can do one.

But marriage is great. You should definitely try it. I mean, you won’t, because rents are so gigantic that you can barely even afford to live in a grotty flatshare while travelling to and from a job that’s slowly destroying your will to live, and something as ostentatious as a wedding is quite rightly your lowest priority. But eventually. You should definitely try marriage eventually. It’s the sensible, mature, adult thing to do.

Sure, the responsibility and commitment of marriage pale into insignificance next to the responsibility and commitment of other grown-up activities such as owning a house and having kids, which means that marriage is essentially just a big, expensive, meaningless party to which you only invite people out of a crushing sense of obligation. But it’s nice. Honestly, give it a go. Do it for the man from the Marriage Foundation. He’s doing his nut over there.

We can all learn a lot from Vladimir Putin

Now, I realise that only bigots and taxi drivers start arguments by saying “We could learn a lot from Vladimir Putin”. But, that being said, we could actually learn a lot from Vladimir Putin. Did you see his press conference on Thursday? The one where he announced a fleet of apparently invincible nuclear weapons with such verve and flair that he may as well have been unveiling a new iPhone? It was incredible. It was so fundamentally terrifying that I lost three fingernails trying to claw an underground bunker out of frozen earth but, man, that guy can sell.

Nobody seems fully sure whether Putin’s new line of undetectable, unpredictable, unstoppable low-altitude nuclear missiles are real or just preposterous pre-election bluster. But that doesn’t really matter. During the final half of his speech, Putin basically just chatted over animated footage of incomprehensible destruction, including – rather ballsily – a scene where dozens of nuclear missiles rained down on Mar-A-Lago. It was roughly the equivalent of Theresa May breaking off from a big Brexit speech to treat everyone to a Blu-ray presentation of The Day After Tomorrow.

So perhaps this is what will break the stale, say-nothing political landscape of Britain in 2018. Forget nuance. Forget conciliation. What we need now is blazing, boggle-eyed hyperbole. May or Corbyn, I don’t care who, you need to grab a stage and promise a kaleidoscope of bloodthirsty vengeance, the likes of which humanity has never seen. You should release a party political broadcast made of nothing but screaming and explosions and boiling eyeballs. You should ride around topless on a horse, surveying the damage while wearing a crown made of your enemies’ shattered skulls.

Yes, it would be horrifying and immoral and we would still be mired in Brexit, but at least it would be interesting.

Naming storms robs them of their dignity

Can we all agree to stop naming individual bursts of weather. Remember the great storm of 1987? Now that was a storm with dignity. That was a storm that said “chisel me into the annals of history”. Three decades on, Michael Fish mistake aside, it still sounds like a moment of national importance. But the Beast From the East? That sounds like a wrestler. In fact, it’s nearly the nickname of late WWE star Bam Bam Bigelow. Thirty years from now, you’ll tell your children about the Beast From the East and they will laugh. And rightly so.