The number of people living in unhappy relationships has more than doubled in five years, to over 1 million, according to research by the Office for National Statistics. A few methodological questions leap out immediately: since when did the ONS ask us about misery and, more precisely, whether or not it’s relationship-based? Exactly how granular does the level of questioning get – are you required to put down exactly what it is about your partner that makes you so miserable, so they can be sure you’re not just a miserable person who happens to be in a relationship? And do they extrapolate from one miserable person that there must be another, or is there leeway for the person in despair to have a spouse who thinks that everything’s fine? These figures could be much higher or much lower, is all I’m saying. But either way, they’re not great.
Since these couples are becoming less happy as the economy improves, this has been taken by some as proof that it is a financial recovery, rather than a recession, that chips away at marital bliss. The charity Relate uses the term “social recession”, though, to indicate that there’s a lag between an economic bust and a personal bust-up: relationships deteriorate in the wake of a financial recession, not in tandem with it.
The mechanism by which money, or lack of it, can erode harmony over time is perfectly clear. There’s an equally clear fault line: on one side will be the people who were only together because they couldn’t afford to split up, and living like that over time will have made them more desperate; on the other, the people who probably wouldn’t have wanted to split up, had money not made them both so miserable.
You wouldn’t wish a reconciliation on the first group. You would wish them the resources they need to enact their desires. For the second group, things are muddier. Did financial pressures make them work too hard, so they were too tired to empathise, and never saw one another, so their grievances deepened? Did the sheer anxiety of worrying about money change their brain chemistry, interrupting the generosity that makes human intimacy possible? Are those situations reversible, once there’s more money to go around? It’s pretty difficult when you’re miserable to tell exactly which sort of misery yours is. Besides which, too long living as people who wanted to split only because of money worries will turn you inevitably into people who can’t imagine wanting to stay together.
If this is social recession at micro level, it is interesting to consider the macro trend. Financial recessions have similar impacts on extended families and friendship groups, with a similar time lag. In the immediate aftermath of a fiscal shock, say a person has lost their job. A family will rally round. Indeed, it feels like a deeper bond when you need one another and will admit it. I’ve heard workers at both debt charities and food banks observe that the spike in demand is often some years after the recession itself, as the well of informal support runs dry. It is humiliating to need help, and painful to run out of the means to give it. But families will spend years trying before they sink.
To pan out more widely still, there is a feeling of a social marriage collapsing after too long spent trying to live peaceably on not quite enough. The dirtiest and most acrimonious divorce is happening in the Labour party, as both sides fling ever more savage accusations at each other, in a bid for custody over the infrastructure (the Tories are more like the miserable households of the ONS, putting a brave face on a union of convenience).
But politics in its broadest sense, the strands that constitute the fabric, is unravelling. The genius of the austerity narrative for two or three years after the crash was that it sounded quite fun, a Blitz-style project that would both unite us and remind us of what was really important. Yoked to the donkey that was “big society”, it was supposed to be exciting to cut social security and pare back the shared resources of the state. It would give us the space to show how much we really cared for one another. Community spirit, in this frame, had been crowded out pre-2007 by too much generosity from the centre.
It was always nonsense, as many of us politely noted from the start, and should never have been called austerity but rather a redistribution from the poor to the rich. As the years of belt-tightening have made life less liveable, the social landscape has come to replicate an unhappy marriage: what were previously points of difference – were you more or less concerned with sovereignty, more or less happy about immigration, more or less international in outlook? – have hardened into positions that are completely irreconcilable.
The rules of warmth that you need to resolve conflict – assume goodwill, say things earlier rather than later – have been replaced by each side imputing terrible motives or wilful stupidity to the other. As a country we have painted ourselves into a corner where, in the best case scenario, only half of us will be deeply unhappy. The difference is that we can’t divorce. We can’t even have a trial separation. We need some kind of mediation to get through this: maybe a neutral outsider (Switzerland?) or perhaps Relate could launch a political wing. I don’t think GDP is going to help.
