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| In the Ashley Madison era, marriage needs a rethink | In the Ashley Madison era, marriage needs a rethink |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Cheaters never think they’ll get caught. That’s the obvious explanation why 37 million people signed up to Ashley Madison, an online matchmaking service for people seeking affairs – and seemingly unaware that the very worst place to seek discretion and privacy these days is probably online. Sure enough, an anonymous group of hackers is now threatening to expose users’ identities and intimate habits unless the site shuts down; it’s hard to decide which of the activities involved – cyber blackmail, building a business on wrecking marriages, or just good old-fashioned philandering – is least charming. | Cheaters never think they’ll get caught. That’s the obvious explanation why 37 million people signed up to Ashley Madison, an online matchmaking service for people seeking affairs – and seemingly unaware that the very worst place to seek discretion and privacy these days is probably online. Sure enough, an anonymous group of hackers is now threatening to expose users’ identities and intimate habits unless the site shuts down; it’s hard to decide which of the activities involved – cyber blackmail, building a business on wrecking marriages, or just good old-fashioned philandering – is least charming. |
| Related: It hurts, but I’m going to defend Ashley Madison and 33 million adulterers | Van Badham | Related: It hurts, but I’m going to defend Ashley Madison and 33 million adulterers | Van Badham |
| But depressing as almost everything about this story is, it’s not really surprising; indeed the surprise is perhaps that there aren’t more than 37 million people feeling really quite nervous right now, given that research routinely suggests that about one in five people have cheated on a partner, with or without electronic help. It’s not the e-philanderers nervously checking the news who fascinate so much as the millions of perfectly well-behaved partners now surely wondering whether it’s naive to think their spouse would never do such a thing. | |
| The Ashley Madison slogan was famously: “Life is short. Have an affair.” But it’s perhaps more pertinent that life is long, and life expectancy ticking upwards. People now enjoy choices denied to their grandparents’ generation – to separate without crippling social stigma; to work (in the case of women) and thus not depend financially on a man; to marry a same-sex partner; or just never to marry at all – and potentially much longer in which to regret bad choices, only deepening the anxiety about getting it right. Can you really remain endlessly fascinating to each other, and only each other, for up to 70 years? Is “staying together for the kids” a cop-out or the mature choice? And if lifelong fidelity is becoming one of those laws that everyone tacitly accepts gets broken, like cycling on pavements or speeding on motorways, does that mean marriage itself is in need of a reboot? | The Ashley Madison slogan was famously: “Life is short. Have an affair.” But it’s perhaps more pertinent that life is long, and life expectancy ticking upwards. People now enjoy choices denied to their grandparents’ generation – to separate without crippling social stigma; to work (in the case of women) and thus not depend financially on a man; to marry a same-sex partner; or just never to marry at all – and potentially much longer in which to regret bad choices, only deepening the anxiety about getting it right. Can you really remain endlessly fascinating to each other, and only each other, for up to 70 years? Is “staying together for the kids” a cop-out or the mature choice? And if lifelong fidelity is becoming one of those laws that everyone tacitly accepts gets broken, like cycling on pavements or speeding on motorways, does that mean marriage itself is in need of a reboot? |
| It’s not that marriage is a dying institution: after 40 years of decline, last year the number of married over-16s rose to 51.2% of the population (51.5% if you include civil partnerships) – up from 50.7% in 2011. But the proliferation of alternatives has perhaps made us think harder about the nature of commitment. | It’s not that marriage is a dying institution: after 40 years of decline, last year the number of married over-16s rose to 51.2% of the population (51.5% if you include civil partnerships) – up from 50.7% in 2011. But the proliferation of alternatives has perhaps made us think harder about the nature of commitment. |
| Earlier this month a blog by the writer Isabelle Tessier entitled I Want To Be Single – But With You went viral. The writer wanted to “imagine the loft of our dreams, knowing that we will probably never move in together”; to flirt with others but go home together; to be in love, but in “a relationship that is anything but clear”. She wasn’t arguing for sleeping around but for the security of a long-term relationship without the commitment: the romantic equivalent of renting, not buying. | Earlier this month a blog by the writer Isabelle Tessier entitled I Want To Be Single – But With You went viral. The writer wanted to “imagine the loft of our dreams, knowing that we will probably never move in together”; to flirt with others but go home together; to be in love, but in “a relationship that is anything but clear”. She wasn’t arguing for sleeping around but for the security of a long-term relationship without the commitment: the romantic equivalent of renting, not buying. |
| Had a man written this blog he would probably have been denounced as a toxic bachelor; but when written by a woman, it spread with the kind of speed that suggests there are plenty more wannabe renters out there, with an enthusiasm, perhaps, for rethinking long-term relationships in the same way that millennials have had to rethink everything else – from work to asset ownership – along more casualised, flexible, precarious lines. | Had a man written this blog he would probably have been denounced as a toxic bachelor; but when written by a woman, it spread with the kind of speed that suggests there are plenty more wannabe renters out there, with an enthusiasm, perhaps, for rethinking long-term relationships in the same way that millennials have had to rethink everything else – from work to asset ownership – along more casualised, flexible, precarious lines. |
| If the whole thing still feels like a straitjacket, we have a revolutionary marital option: not getting married | |
| And that’s roughly the argument made by Vicki Larson and Susan Pease Gadoua in their book The New I Do, as plugged this week by the telly sexpert Tracey Cox. Basically, they say, marriage (although the idea arguably applies to other long-term committed relationships) should no longer be seen as a one-size-fits-all template, but a menu with a range of options. | And that’s roughly the argument made by Vicki Larson and Susan Pease Gadoua in their book The New I Do, as plugged this week by the telly sexpert Tracey Cox. Basically, they say, marriage (although the idea arguably applies to other long-term committed relationships) should no longer be seen as a one-size-fits-all template, but a menu with a range of options. |
| You might choose a “starter marriage”, a sort of try-before-you-buy set period before having kids, during which you work out if this is a good idea. You might try a “living apart together” model, where both partners keep separate homes à la Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter (well, before their separation). Or a “safety” one, where you are each other’s comfort blanket. The key thing, the authors suggest, is the two partners agreeing terms – and crucially not regarding a marriage as “failed” if it ends having done the job it was intended for, such as raising children. | You might choose a “starter marriage”, a sort of try-before-you-buy set period before having kids, during which you work out if this is a good idea. You might try a “living apart together” model, where both partners keep separate homes à la Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter (well, before their separation). Or a “safety” one, where you are each other’s comfort blanket. The key thing, the authors suggest, is the two partners agreeing terms – and crucially not regarding a marriage as “failed” if it ends having done the job it was intended for, such as raising children. |
| The obvious snag – apart from the fact that what you merrily envisage as a loose “living apart” union might be your partner’s, or indeed children’s, safety blanket – is these “new” relationships are mostly as old as the hills. What Larson and Pease Gadoua call the “parenting marriage” – getting hitched because you’re running out of time to have kids – does sound like a genuinely new byproduct of contemporary trends towards later motherhood. But perhaps even that’s a new twist on a centuries-old fear that not marrying meant not becoming a mother, at least in times when to have children outside wedlock was beyond the pale. | The obvious snag – apart from the fact that what you merrily envisage as a loose “living apart” union might be your partner’s, or indeed children’s, safety blanket – is these “new” relationships are mostly as old as the hills. What Larson and Pease Gadoua call the “parenting marriage” – getting hitched because you’re running out of time to have kids – does sound like a genuinely new byproduct of contemporary trends towards later motherhood. But perhaps even that’s a new twist on a centuries-old fear that not marrying meant not becoming a mother, at least in times when to have children outside wedlock was beyond the pale. |
| “Living apart together” has arguably long been the basis of many traditional commuter marriages – breadwinning husband in London all week, homemaker wife buried in the country – and what military wives have done for generations. The old idea of marriage merely as a dynastic arrangement, a means of uniting families with common political interests or adjoining land, may have long gone, but plenty of people still get married for a wide variety of pragmatic, unsentimental reasons. It’s just that they don’t admit as much to themselves. | |
| Such is the power of the fairytale, and the determination to believe in it, that countless brides and grooms go down the aisle grimly shutting out the small, nagging voice of doubt – while a handful seem to wake up only at the very last minute. Out of idle journalistic curiosity (honest) I asked the vicar who married us nine years ago if he’d ever had to deal with someone piping up during the “If any of you knows cause, or just impediment, why these two should not be joined together” part of proceedings. He had, memorably: it wasn’t a guest who objected but the bride, accusing the groom of sleeping with a bridesmaid. | |
| Related: My wedding was perfect – and I was fat as hell the whole time | |
| Perhaps it’s not spurious “new” forms of relationship we need so much as honesty about the various kinds that have long existed, and how potentially elastic they already are: honesty about the fact that most long-term relationships endure occasional crummy patches; that struggling through big life events – having small children, ageing, redundancy, bereavement – is normal; and that there may be times when sticking at it owes more to practicality than dewy-eyed devotion. | Perhaps it’s not spurious “new” forms of relationship we need so much as honesty about the various kinds that have long existed, and how potentially elastic they already are: honesty about the fact that most long-term relationships endure occasional crummy patches; that struggling through big life events – having small children, ageing, redundancy, bereavement – is normal; and that there may be times when sticking at it owes more to practicality than dewy-eyed devotion. |
| Obviously, nobody should tolerate abusive or grindingly miserable relationships, and there’s no call for sanctimoniously judging people who can’t make it work; but nor should we judge those who stay together in ways or circumstances that may seem baffling to outsiders. | Obviously, nobody should tolerate abusive or grindingly miserable relationships, and there’s no call for sanctimoniously judging people who can’t make it work; but nor should we judge those who stay together in ways or circumstances that may seem baffling to outsiders. |
| And if the whole thing still feels like a straitjacket – well, we already have a revolutionary new marital option for that: it’s called “not getting married”. | And if the whole thing still feels like a straitjacket – well, we already have a revolutionary new marital option for that: it’s called “not getting married”. |
| It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Most committed couples still set out intending to forsake all others and plenty achieve it, which suggests that aiming any lower smacks of an unhappily self-fulfilling prophecy unless you’re both genuine open-marriage enthusiasts. | It’s not all doom and gloom, of course. Most committed couples still set out intending to forsake all others and plenty achieve it, which suggests that aiming any lower smacks of an unhappily self-fulfilling prophecy unless you’re both genuine open-marriage enthusiasts. |
| But there is perhaps a case for accepting that, as the psychologist Donald Winnicott famously said of mothers, “good enough” can be good enough; a case for neither holding marriages to impossibly high standards that guarantee disappointment, nor grimly settling for second rate. | But there is perhaps a case for accepting that, as the psychologist Donald Winnicott famously said of mothers, “good enough” can be good enough; a case for neither holding marriages to impossibly high standards that guarantee disappointment, nor grimly settling for second rate. |
| “Life is long, so muddle through in a pragmatic fashion” sucks as a slogan. But it’s been working for centuries. | “Life is long, so muddle through in a pragmatic fashion” sucks as a slogan. But it’s been working for centuries. |
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