Earlier this week, former England rugby union player Ben Foden announced that he had married his girlfriend, entrepreneur Jackie Belanoff-Smith, after just two weeks of dating. In a heartfelt Instagram post, showing pictures of the couple beaming on a boat at sunset, Foden gushed about his love for Belanoff-Smith. “People will say we are mad or crazy or even fools ... But when someone like her comes in to your life, why would I wait?” Foden also thanked his ex-wife, singer Una Healy of the Saturdays – with whom he has two children – for giving the union her blessing.
Can a relationship in which both parties have known each other for less time than I have been meaning to take the recycling out really go the distance?
“It is very rare that we see people marrying this quickly,” says Professor Brienna Perelli-Harris of the University of Southampton, an expert on demographic trends in marriage and cohabitation. Typically couples that wed after such a brief courtship do so because of pressing external factors: because one partner is being posted abroad in the military, terminal illness, or “financial benefits of some sort”, says Perelli-Harris.
Foden and Belanoff-Smith are an example of what she terms “direct marriage”, in which two people wed before having cohabited. Since the 1990s, this has become increasingly rare: 70% of modern couples now live together before getting married. (Those who don’t may not do so for cultural reasons, such as in the case of many arranged marriages.) “People are becoming more uncertain about their relationships, because they see that so many marriages have ended in divorce, including maybe their own parents’, so they don’t want to rush into it.”
Cohabitation is an important stress test, says Perelli-Harris. “The previous research used to show that premarital cohabitation was bad for relationships and that people were more likely to break up if they lived together before getting married, but that has pretty much gone away.” Most couples will either get married or break up within three years of moving in together, following what demographic researchers call a “trial period”. “People in our focus groups use terms like, ‘try before you buy’,” she says
So does Perelli-Harris think a marriage after two weeks of dating could really work? “We know that couples who have lived together longer are less likely to dissolve their relationships.” Meaning that Foden and Belanoff-Smith are probably not going to grow old together? “I would guess that’s the case,” she says, apologetically. Now, to take out the recycling.
