Last Friday, the daughter of some friends married her boyfriend of several years’ standing. She’s twenty-one years of age by several weeks, and therefore perfectly entitled by every conceivable law of God and man to take the plunge. Moreover, as the couple are fervent evangelical Christians, they will not only enjoy the support of both sets of parents but enter their married life in the belief that theirs is a lifelong commitment, not to be discarded when misfortune strikes or the ardent love of their teens and twenties turns into the thirtysomething’s ease in a partner’s company, and which many couples mistake for boredom. But from talking to colleagues and hearing their wedding plans, it’s clear that although my friends’ daughter and her new husband are doing things in the time-honoured way, they are also in a minority these days.

Among my colleagues are three young women of a similar age- if anything, three or four years older than my friends’ daughter- who are also planning their own weddings. Two live with their intended husbands, while the third will as soon as their new home has been renovated; this is, of course, nothing new or remarkable, and given that we work for a bank, may even be the financially responsible course of action. Whereas in the past it was traditional for a bride’s father to pay for the wedding, in more enlightened times there is absolutely no reason save custom why a couple each earning, say, £15,000 a year should not pay for their own ceremony and subsequent entertainment. And given the number of specialists in the various fields of dress, floral arrangements, catering and so on, a well-organised wedding these days can cost a small fortune, so on a purely monetary basis it may well be preferable for couples with no spiritual commitment to live together and save the cost of the wedding over several years, rather than enter on their married life burdened with the expenses of the ceremony. Because even though there is now no shock attached to young unmarried couples keeping a household together, people still want to marry and still look forward to the big family occasion with fancy dress, a tiered cake, Wagner and Mendelssohn and the father of the bride making a slightly tipsy speech with the same jokes which were found inscribed on the wall of Tutankhamun’s tomb. We still have a human need for continuity and tradition, although I know of at least one case where the burdens of continuity, tradition and satisfying two sets of relatives were such that the couple concerned decided to hang it all and marry in Florida.

But then several weeks ago I found myself at a barbecue with a group of people, mostly over sixty years of age, reminiscing about their early years of marriage- from having to pool their resources to find the king’s ransom of seven shillings and sixpence for the licence, to the dreadful day when a young husband lost his wage packet and had to walk the three miles home to face his wife. While it’s easy to make fun of these reminiscences, it’s also difficult not to respect the deprivations that young couples were prepared to tolerate in the early days of their union in order to build a life together. Faced with the loss of a week’s wages, a couple of today would simply extend their overdraft and do the weekly shopping on their credit card. And the couples who started out with very little have in the main come out of the experience more committed to each other as a result of the shared hardship- by contrast, an ex-colleague summarily dismissed for a misdemeanour at work lost job, home and partner in the space of a day. The whole nature of the commitment involved in marriage does seem to have changed, at least among those with no spiritual commitment to the concept- rather than being united for better or worse, there seems to be an expectation now that each partner has to be prepared to keep their side of the bargain, pull their weight and, at least until children come along, bring in a wage. Still, as I mentioned, as long as young couples aspire to a dream wedding with all the trimmings, the guardians of the institution of marriage need not worry about marriage falling out of fashion.