Marriage Foundation, a UK charity, recently surveyed 2,000 young adults for Marriage Week 2021 and found that over 80 percent of 18-30s want to marry.
So why won't our politicians back marriage?
I am the Research Director of Marriage Foundation. For at least two decades, I have been a strong advocate for marriage, not out of some sense of loyalty to outdated traditions, but because the psychology of marriage and the evidence about the effects of marriage go so strongly with the grain of human nature.
Study after study suggests that marriage works more than it doesn't for most people, despite what many people assume about divorce rates.
The better-off know this.
Among parents in the top socio-economic groupings, for example, three quarters are married by the time their children are born. Among cabinet members in the UK, 85 percent (23 out of 27) are married for the first time. The Prime Minister is unusual in being the only person on his second or more marriage, in his case about to begin his third.
So why are our politicians and policy-makers such fans of marriage in their private lives and yet so reticent to back marriage in public policy?
If you doubt me, when did you hear a cabinet member give a speech on the importance of marriage? When did a cabinet member say that the £250 married couples allowance was not nearly incentive or reward enough? Or when did any of them comment, assuming they are even aware, that couples stand to lose up to £10,000 a year in universal credit if they marry their partner?
Maybe they won't back marriage in public because they don't think the public are interested.
Surveys suggest otherwise. In 2018, the Centre for Social Justice found that 93 percent of teenage young men said they expected to marry at some point. In 2008, a survey of young adults under 30 by Anastasia de Waal at Civitas found much the same.
But clearly there's a need for an update. So we commissioned our own survey of 2,000 adults under 30, the Tik Tok generation.
What we found is that the vast majority of young adults still want to marry:
You can download our paper here . The verdict is clear.
Young adults overwhelmingly want to marry.
We invite government to affirm this strong desire to marry by backing the annual celebration of Marriage Week, and to motivate development of a fearless policy that promotes and distinguishes marriage in line with the evidence.