The future of marriage post-covid

Marriage rates will more than rebound after lockdown ends as couple reevaluate their lives. But will this be the start of a new uptrend? Marriage rates in the UK are currently at close to zero. When the government banned weddings as part of the lockdown measures, they may have meant just to ban gatherings. But, […]

In banning weddings, government has unintentionally banned marriages

Several people have written to me to ask how they can get married. Under the new coronavirus law, weddings are banned. As a result, churches and civil registrars have both closed their doors. We appear to have lost our right to marry. Societies throughout history have given special legal privileges to those who marry. In […]

Number 10 needs a Family Policy Unit

The costs – personal, social, economic – of family breakdown are vast and underappreciated. This is a social justice issue.  My article for the political website ConservativeHome …  A friend of ours is an amazing woman who has brought up her now teenage children on her own, having split from the father soon after their […]

Falling divorce rates mean more intact families, new ONS stats show

Falling divorce means more intact families, says Harry Benson, Research Director for Marriage Foundation New ONS Families and Household data for 2019 are released today “Today’s figures provide yet another reminder to politicians of all parties that if they want greater family stability, they must wholeheartedly back marriage and commitment. Despite the well-documented increase in […]

Happy wife, Happy life

It’s a well-known expression. But in an age of equality where men and women are equals, is it true? Does a happy wife really have more influence on a family’s well-being than a happy husband? Previous research has suggested this might be the case. Separate studies have shown that happy wives tend to influence their […]

A nation divided … over marriage

It’s not just Brexit. Britain is also a nation divided over marriage. The better off marry and mostly stay together. The less well off don’t marry and face a much higher risk of splitting up. New figures out from the Office for National Statistics show that the vast majority of parents start off as a […]

A really good news story to begin 2019

One of the issues we’ve tried to address at Marriage Foundation is to find out the scale of family breakdown. A few years back, we addressed this by analysing data from 2010 in a big national survey called Understanding Society. From this, we worked out that 45 per cent of all teens were not living […]

Keeping mum boosts mental health, teens told

PRESS RELEASE FROM MARRIAGE FOUNDATION Date: 02 August 2018 Keeping mum boosts mental health, teens told Mummy’s boys may be the butt of jokes and subject to name-calling, but they actually fare better in roughing out the challenges of teenage life than those more detached from their mother’s apron strings. New research by Marriage Foundation, […]

A simple policy on marriage for Mrs May

Government policy on marriage is lukewarm at best and downright ambivalent at worst. On the one hand, the state is terribly interested in marriage. We have strict laws on who can marry and how marriages can end, and we have special rules that favour transfers of assets between husband and wife in life and after death. But […]

Cheap sex, so why should men marry?

There’s a deep irony about the subject of marriage and men. On the one hand, marriage appears to benefit men more than women. Men’s health in particular, for example, is better among those who get and stay married. On the other hand, men appear to resist marriage more than women. In a couple of surveys […]