Congratulations to Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton on the announcement of their wedding. I admit, though, when I heard the news yesterday morning, I felt a little bit disappointed.
Let me clarify; it’s not that I have a huge crush on the Labour leader and was hoping he’d one day be mine. It’s just that one of the things I liked about him was that he wasn’t married to the mother of his children.
A few years ago, I attended the Relate Annual Lecture, where keynote speaker David Cameron outlined his policies for promoting marriage. ‘I’m a marriage freak, as it were, because I’m a commitment freak,’ he said. Now, working at Psychologies magazine for six years teaches you one or two things — one of those things being how much research indicates that marriage is good for the health of a couple, and for society in general. But even though I know all that, I regret not asking David Cameron how he thought the children of single parents would feel, how bereaved partners would feel, how abused wives who’d had the courage to leave their marriage would feel when they learned that in his view, they were living an inferior model.
That might seem like a bit of a stretch, not at all what he was suggesting, you might think. But as someone who grew up with divorced parents, I definitely bristled at the implication that my parents would have done a better job if they’d stayed married. ‘The one thing worse for a child than family breakdown is a badly handled family breakdown,’ he said. I’m not sure I agree — growing up in a house with two parents but full of tension and resentment can often be worse. And as for being a ‘commitment freak’….marriage doesn’t seem to deter that many people from splitting up or having affairs, does it?
It’s not that I disagree with marriage (I happen to have a very nice husband), but the suggestion that one model fits all seems reductive. It was refreshing to have the leader of a political party who was happily committed, but not happily married. When Ed Miliband told Piers Morgan earlier this year that the more political pressure he felt to get married, the more he felt the urge to resist, I thought ‘good’. Marriage is a lovely institution when it works, but can’t we acknowledge that people who co-habit or people who raise children on their own, whether through choice or not, can do a bloody good job too?
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