May I wish you a very happy Marriage Week, running up to Valentine’s day. This is a particularly good time to think about marriage and celebrate the most successful mechanism in human history for helping couples to raise families.

This week The Times has been running a story about the young adults of Gen Z (born 1997-2010). According to their new survey, two thirds of young adults think marriage is important and are now half as likely to as their predecessor Millennials (born 1981-1996) to think marriage is irrelevant. In this way, Gen Z appear to be showing a socially conservative streak. What’s going on?

The young adults of Gen Z have experienced the highest rate of family breakdown in recorded UK history over the past 200 years.

Several studies, including my own, show that nearly half of today’s teenagers are not living with both natural parents. This is an astonishingly high level of breakdown. For sure, some relationships are bound to break down and deserve to come to an end. But half? That’s a huge proportion. Why aren’t our policy makers talking about this?

Well, Gen Z have lived it. They know that, among their peers, almost all the parents who are still together are married. Among their peers whose parents split up, the majority of those parents had never married.

Maybe, just maybe, Gen Z are joining the dots. Their own subjective experience of family life is consistent with what the world of research and data and stats has been showing them objectively for years.

Their best chance of commitment, security, staying together and finding reliable love is to get married.

There is of course a huge catch here. Aspirations and achievements don’t always match up. Even if most young adults aspire to marry at some stage, based on current trends only a little over half will achieve it.

Worse, marriage is increasingly the preserve of the better off. Despite the hard evidence from peer reviewed studies that parents who marry are more likely to stay together, and despite the huge social benefit to families that comes from staying together, we have made it incredibly hard for the poorest families to marry.

Our welfare system has a couple penalty built into it. If you move in with your partner, let alone marry them, their income is included in your welfare assessment. In short, you move in or marry, and you get fewer benefits. Among newborns, three quarters of higher-earning parents will be married compared to fewer than one in five. When you stand to lose as much as all your Universal Credit, the miracle is that anyone marries at all.

Forget the cost of a wedding, which is a one-off (and by the way doesn’t need to be anything like as extravagant as the wedding industry would have you believe). Get married and you stand to lose part or all of your benefits. Every year.

So, on this Marriage Week, let’s do two things. First, let’s celebrate Gen Z who are showing the first signs of a backlash against family breakdown and are pursuing the dream of marriage.

This generation wants more. They want the dream. They want commitment. They want a family that stays together. They know that marriage gives them their best shot of achieving reliable love.

But let’s also help give them that shot, especially to all those who will be outside the top income group, by raising awareness of the couple penalty. Talk to your friends. Talk to people of influence. Let’s help Gen Z turn their aspiration into achievement.

Harry Benson, Research Director