Like many children of divorce, I’ll never forget the day my parents told me they were splitting up.
I was 12, and I’d come rushing home from school with a picture I had done in art class – a Picasso copied from a book, in oil pastels. I was ridiculously proud of it, and couldn’t wait to show my parents. But I never did show them the picture, because when I got home they were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to tell me that their marriage was over.
There was hardly anything about the divorce that was not traumatic, which is why I agreed with Pope Francis when he said in address this week that those who suffer most in a separation are children.
Everything about that time in my life was horrible – from seeing my dad cry for the first time, to my autistic brother’s confused and repeated refrain of “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”, and how he went to bed in his shoes and his coat in order to be ready if Dad came back to collect him.
My mother’s sadness, exhaustion and anger; the feeling that the safe space of home was falling apart; the burning loneliness of it; the transition on to free school meals, something we kids understood at the time as being a public acknowledgement of the fact that your dad didn’t live with you. You’d think it would be enough to put anyone off the idea of marriage.
The pope has suggested that young people are no longer getting married because the rising levels of divorce have bred in them of a fear of failure. For some, this may be the case. But in my experience, children of divorce tend to fall into two camps. Either the experience made them lose faith in the institution of marriage, and they are adamant they will never marry for fear of making the same mistakes their parents did; or, on the contrary, they feel passionately that they would love to get married one day.
I fall into the latter category. Not because I feel that marriage is a superior choice to cohabitation, or from any conservative notions of the traditional nuclear family.
As I’m a feminist, you might think that marriage’s roots in patriarchal notions of ownership would be a bit of a turnoff as well (not to mention the dishonesty of wearing white). But since gay marriage has been legalised, and mothers’ names now appear on marriage certificates, marriage has shed much of its traditional image and become what each individual couple wants to make of it.
Your wedding can be as barmy, progressive or eccentric as you want it to be, but it’s a personal choice to do it or not. My choice just happens to be that I’d really like to do it one day. In a register office, with a pub do afterwards (once I have given up smoking: I have the outdated notion of not wanting to be a bride with a fag in her hand). But still – I’m in team matrimony.
As a child, I watched my family break apart, and even in adulthood this still has its vestigial effects. I crave stability, and have always felt a lonely pang, at Christmas or when I’m visiting friends’ houses and see how happy their families are together.
That’s not to say that divorce was not right for my parents: it was the best thing for all of us, and two unhappy parents together do not make for happy children. It’s just that I want to be part of a unit again. To me, marriage is saying to your assembled loved ones and to the world at large: “I love this person so much that I want them to be legally and properly my family.” It’s supremely romantic, that public commitment to being together regardless of the peaks and troughs of life. And if it doesn’t work out, then you tried.
That’s not to say that you should enter marriage lightly. But people change. They stop communicating; they fall out of love; or, in the case of having a disabled child, they might just cope with the situation differently. I do not regard my parents’ marriage as a failure – it lasted 15 years.
And while I do think fear of divorce is putting some young people off marriage, I don’t think it’s that simple. Being kept in a perpetual state of adolescence through unstable jobs or zero-hours contracts, not to mention the housing crisis, doesn’t help.
Most of my peers have the idea that you need to own a house first. Having been born into a co-op house full of hippies, and facing the realistic prospect of being a geriatric first-time buyer, I don’t share this notion, but I can see why it would make many young people feel as though they aren’t anywhere near ready.
The dating game seems to have changed since I was single as well: with so many amateur DJs and humanitarians on Tinder, how can you be sure you’ve made the right choice?
And then you have the people who just don’t see marriage as important. And fair enough, I say. It’s your life, and one of the great things about 2015 is that you can “live in sin” without shame and children born “out of wedlock” will no longer face a stigma. Equally, monogamy might just not be your thing.
It is, I think, a sign of social progress that people are building their own modern families – whether single or sprawling, monogamous or open, with or without marriage. In comparison, it’s probably hopelessly conventional of me to want to be a wife. But there it is.
I’ll never forget the day my parents split up, and how I chucked the picture I had carefully drawn in the bin. But the one thing I didn’t throw away was hope.
