ninme

Typically, I’d be naming my firstborn, but I’ve already done Camilla.

The Times - Why we all need to commit My attitude to marriage is changing. My middle-class reluctance to judge others is fading, by Camilla Cavendish

My friend Ann and her girlfriend are having IVF in New York. My friend Hatty is “basting” every month in London with a gay male friend who has offered to help her have the baby she longs for. My mate Shona shacked up with her boyfriend the day she met him, and was pregnant after two months. They all ask: do you think I’m doing the right thing?

What can I say? Except that it’s pure luck that I ended up with a nice bloke, two children and a ring on my finger, and I could never judge any of these three for finding their own way to make a family. They are educated, they are solvent, they are mature, they have inner resources that will make them great parents.

So when the BBC recently asked me to make a radio programme about the return of marriage to the centre of political debate, I assumed I’d be taking a pretty liberal line. Experts of all political stripes are agreed that stability is hugely important for children. But stability, I figured, surely came in all shapes and sizes.

The reality nags at me. Analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study, of 18,500 babies born in 2000 and 2001, finds that education, income and age (the higher the better) are important factors in whether two parents will stay together. But the biggest single determinant of stability is whether they are married or not. About half — half! — of cohabitees split up before their child reaches 5. The richest 20 per cent of cohabiting couples do better, but their rate of breakup is no better than that of the poorest 20 per cent of married couples. So while poverty puts a strain on relationships, marriage seems to buffer that strain.

This has made me wonder whether it is a bit of a middle-class luxury to be so reluctant to judge other people’s relationships.

Oh ho!

Is it, in fact, a kind of snobbery in those of us who babble about the liberation of alternative life choices, who know nothing of the ugliness and loneliness of a teenage mother’s life on benefits? We like to think of lone mothers as robust martyrs, struggling but winning in quiet, spartan homes. But at the lower end of the scale the reality is often a succession of boyfriends who bring a hugely inflated risk of domestic violence both to the mother and to the child who witnesses it (who is more likely in his turn to become violent).

Oh ho!

What we are really doing, when we say that anything goes, is denigrating commitment. And that is a problem.

Oh ho!!

Well, now. I do like the name Camilla. Btw, “The Blessing of Marriage is broadcast tonight at 8.30pm on Radio 4 and repeated on Sunday at 9.30pm”. For those of you not in the throes of Thanksgiving dinner. Or its leftovers.