Carol Clewlow - Not Married, Not Bothered

I feel much the same way about gamophobia.

Fear of marriage.

I used to think I was some sort of oddity, some beast with a brand on my forehead with regard to my gamophobia but now I don’t think so. Tell you the truth, I think that, as a condition, it’s getting as common as measles. For a start, people are putting it off. The average age for marriage now is thirty for men, twenty-eight for women, a rise of five years over the last quarter of a century. *The way things are going, in fifty years’ time, people will be hitting the big four-oh before they clamber into their wedding clobber.

As much as anything, of course, this has to do with the increased social acceptance of cohabiting instead of, or prior to, marriage. A quarter of the nation is now shacked up without benefit of clergy – or Living In Sin as my mother prefers to call it – a figure expected to double over the next ten years. As a result of this more than forty per cent of the nation’s babies are now born to cohabiting couples, a ten per cent rise over the last decade. Cue a bout of enthusiastic tutting from my mother when she read it in her morning paper.

‘All those children born out of wedlock.’

‘ Out of wedlock . For God’s sake, you’ll be saying “wrong side of the blanket” next. We’re not living in a Catherine Cookson novel, Mother.’

Meanwhile there’re no prizes for guessing just why society got a taste for cohabitation as opposed marriage. It’s because it’s not marriage, that’s why. Because it’s not quite that final. Because it represents a resting place, a place to draw breath, to hold back, think twice. A place where there’s still a let-out clause, a light still shining at the end of the tunnel. All the marriage-shy spinster does, as usual, is raise her head that bit higher above the parapet.

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