Harry Benson helps couples learn to make their marriages work. He is on the Conservative group working on family breakdown. It is fascinating to hear from someone who is involved with couples regularly on the issue of what makes marriages last longer on average than co-habitations. It all comes down, he suggests, to one thing.

Last month the Guardian social affairs writer Polly Toynbee declared frostily that marriage is no social panacea. She was writing about the much-publicised interim report on family breakdown submitted to the Tories. As a member of the independent group that wrote the report, I agree. Our report makes no such claim. However her opinion that marriage and cohabitation don’t matter is not supported by the social science evidence. Cohabiting parents, rich and poor alike, are far more likely to split up and lead their families into poverty. Selection effects – social or personal background factors – do not explain this adequately.

This reluctance to accept evidence needs to be challenged. In no other area of life do overwhelming benefits and protections get so lightly dismissed. Sceptics are right to argue that family structure cannot be tested like a medicine. No experiment can randomly assign people to marry or cohabit in order to find out who does best. But there are many studies that suggest family structure matters to stability, well-being and behaviour, above and beyond selection effects.

There are also good reasons why it is thought marriage and cohabitation make people behave differently. Ultimately they can be summed up in one word. Attitude. Far from being a good testing ground for a relationship, cohabitation makes it more difficult to leave an unsuitable partner at an early stage. Inertia is one of the current explanations for the relationship quality gap. The arrival of a baby forces couples to think about their expectations of one another. Whereas stability increases amongst married parents, it reduces dramatically amongst unmarried parents. Furthermore, the longer couples cohabit, the less they value marriage and the more they tolerate divorce. So not only do couples start their marriage or cohabitation with different attitudes to their partnership, but these differences in attitudes become more entrenched over time. Behavioural differences between married and cohabiting couples reflect these attitudes, including level of communication skills, management of finances, and division of household roles.

Even if marriage matters, is Polly Toynbee right that nothing can be done in any case? No. If government policy can contribute to social trends in family structure, then it can also contribute to reversing those trends. Contribute, note, not cause. As for exactly how we suggest policy can encourage greater stability, she will have to wait until our final report next June. The only clue I will give is that there is life beyond tax breaks.

This is Harry Benson's website with lots on making marriages work.

The report is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting

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