Why are people still getting married?

Australian feminist Clementine Ford argues that women should reject marriage once and for all. Sharon Stephenson reads Ford's latest book 'I Don't' and reflects on her own relationship with the ancient institution.

It’s the late 1980s and, at a Catholic college in Lower Hutt, someone asks the teacher what the point of marriage is.

That teacher, an elderly Irish nun so bowed by osteoporosis that her world view is restricted largely to her feet, tells the all-female class that marriage is “the pinnacle of love, commitment and duty." She says: “Holy matrimony is a sacred tradition, the cornerstone of family and society which requires women to put aside their own needs for those of their husband, children and society." Or words to that effect.

I was in that class, cringing so hard I almost popped something internal. The nun wasn't doing a good job of selling marriage to me – or the alternative.

If you’re female and anywhere between the ages of birth and death, chances are you’ve heard some variation on the nun's theme. Marriage – an institution mired in patriarchal traditions all over the world, possibly the most primal of human institutions – is, even today, shorthand for living happily (and respectably) ever after. The pressure to marry to legitimise co-habiting, fornicating and procreating may have dissipated, but the implication remains: comply with the institution or you’ll be a lonely old spinster with lots of cats.

But according to Australian feminist writer Clementine Ford we were sold a lie. “Marriage was built on the idea that women are property which could be exchanged between men,” she writes in 'I Don't' her latest book, a savage take down of the tradition. “I don't understand why a system that has been so monstrously violent, to women in particular, has maintained its primacy in culture. Particularly when we talk about what a success feminism is.”

Once upon a time, we had no choice: people had to put a ring on it in order to have sex, acquire land, produce heirs and avoid being called nasty names. But, as Ford asks over 372 pages that unwrap the misogyny, violence and oppression behind the fairy tale, how is marriage relevant today?

We have, after all, lived through a sexual revolution, the introduction of contraception, the DPB, legal abortion, no-fault divorce, and women entering the workforce in record numbers, even if we've yet to close the pay gap. We can marry who we want, marry numerous times, marry people of the same gender, raise kids on our own and share a postcode with a partner without having first ordered a three-tiered cake.

Some women, who once swore they'd marry but then realised they had bigger dreams (yes Gen Z, I did just mangle a quote from Taylor Swift), opt out of the great marriage conspiracy altogether. Others believe they can marry without taking on any of the self-compromising elements of the tradition.

I should nail my colours to the mast: I got married 12 years ago in Vegas as part of a journalism assignment for a magazine. The traditional church wedding clearly wasn't my dream, although I’m not philosophically opposed to it, if it's what you want. But I share Ford’s misgivings about some of the institution’s archaic tropes – women being "given away" by their fathers like some kind of chattel, taking their husband’s surname, the curiously enduring expectation that men must be the ones to propose – all of this is still the norm. I’d also find it hard to spend so much on something I could neither live in nor drive. The average New Zealand wedding clocks in at around $32,000.

Globally, marriage rates are trending downwards, yet so many women still appear to hanker after this ancient ritual of patriarchal domination. Is the expense, stress and conformity to something with dodgy origins really worth it for a photo album full of drunk people in their best clothes?

Poke around the internet and you’ll find all kinds of dubious research supposedly proving that married folk being happier than non-marrieds and about marriage supposedly conferring all kinds tangible rights and benefits such as better financial, mental, physical and social outcomes.

They're statistics that hard-right conservatives, particularly in the US, have pounced upon. A recent book with the unwieldy title 'The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind' seems to suggest that the two-parent family structure is the panacea for all society’s ills, and that this is an unfashionable secret, hushed up by liberals.

“The evidence is overwhelming,” writes author Melissa Kearney, “that the decline of marriage over the past few decades has been very bad for children and, by extension, society”.

Conservatives lined up to agree, from the politician who claimed that “the destruction of marriage has resulted in widespread poverty in Louisiana” (a US state where the minimum wage is NZ$12.14 an hour) to others who called for the removal of books about divorce from schools. A New York Times columnist Ross Douthat cited an economics paper that explored Americans’ declining levels of happiness over the same decades in which they have married less often and at older ages, summing it up with this gem: “The simplest possible explanation for declining happiness is the decline in marriage. Eventually, less wedlock means more woe."

And more wedlock means more money made. Much much more. The wedding industry is massive around the world; in the US alone it's projected to grow to $413.98 billion in 2030, from $160.5 billion in 2020. In India the industry is now worth trillions.

Second wave feminists such as Germaine Greer who were questioning marriage more than 50 years ago must be rolling their eyes all the way to the back of their heads. The rest of us just shrug and crack on with whatever kind of partnership arrangement – marriage, singledom, cohabiting – best suits our situation.

Yes, marriage is a great excuse for cake but perhaps it's time we stopped giving the institution so much status. After all the sort of relationships we have and want has changed dramatically since the days of that Lower Hutt classroom.

I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage by Clementine Ford (Allen & Unwin) RRP $37.99 is out now.