Making a speech in honour of my parents at their golden wedding anniversary last month, I spoke of my deep pride in their great achievement.

Here are two people, I told family and friends, who epitomise all that is good about marriage: a couple who put their egos to one side to raise their family and nurture a lifelong bond. I meant every word.

But what I left out is that, despite growing up with such a positive example, nothing will ever persuade me to follow the same path.

I will never, ever marry. That’s because the kind of traditional marriage that saw my mum and dad thrive no longer exists. It has been replaced with a modern version so warped that it has ceased to become an institution worth entertaining. Well, not for men anyway.

Peter Lloyd has written a book on why the modern man should avoid marriage at all costs

Indeed, I’ve written a book on the plight of modern man and recently I spoke on national radio imploring every unmarried man to avoid going up the aisle.

It was in response to Iain Duncan Smith’s astonishing claims, made during the Conservative Party conference, that unmarried men are ‘dysfunctional’ human beings and a blight on society.

The former work and pensions secretary said that, out of wedlock, men are ‘released to do all the things they wouldn’t normally do’ — in other words to behave like feckless idiots, committing crime, drinking too much, taking drugs and fathering multiple children.

What nonsense. Marriage doesn’t ‘fix’ or sustain men. I’d argue it does the very opposite, so weighted are our divorce laws towards women.

To illustrate my point, I suggested that a man might as well find a woman who hates him and buy her a house to live in, while he grubs around in a bedsit.

Because, in my view, that’s the brutal reality of what marriage does to men. He’d be better off, financially and emotionally, staying single.

With startlingly high divorce rates, he believes that traditional marriage doesn't exist anymore

Of course, I appear to be horribly contradicting myself — lauding my parents’ achievement one day and hammering marriage the next. But actually I’m just being realistic. Modern marriages simply aren’t built to last in the way they were when my mum and dad got married.

The year they tied the knot — 1967 — there were just over 43,000 divorces in England and Wales. You can roughly treble that figure today.

This means that as soon as you legally commit to a woman now, no matter how much you love her, you take the most reckless gamble on your future wealth, health and happiness.

Then there’s the mental impact. According to a 2013 survey, divorce makes men feel devastated, betrayed, confused and even suicidal. Women are more likely to feel relieved, liberated and happy following a split

The risk being that if it all goes wrong — and around 42 per cent of marriages fail — then matrimonial law, the family courts, indeed society as a whole, will conspire to ensure the biggest loser in the equation ends up being you.

Then there’s the mental impact. According to a 2013 survey, divorce makes men feel devastated, betrayed, confused and even suicidal. Women are more likely to feel relieved, liberated and happy following a split.

Research by Yorkshire Building Society showed that two years after a divorce, 41 per cent of men were still sad; for women the figure was just 33 per cent.

Those figures don’t surprise me. I have a friend who was married for just three years when his wife filed for divorce. She never worked and the house was solely in his name, but — because they had a one-year-old — she gets to live in it until the child turns 18 or finishes full-time education.

In 1976 there were just over 43,000 divorces in England and Wales. It is now three times more

He now lives in a studio flat and works constant overtime trying to pay his rent, the mortgage, plus child support. Meanwhile, she still doesn’t have a job.

Another friend, who divorced more than ten years ago, was recently taken back to court because his ex-wife wanted more money after racking up credit card debts. Incredibly, she won, and he had to cough up another £12,000, plus legal fees, despite the fact they haven’t been married for a decade.

I know someone else — a successful lawyer — who’s been paying maintenance to his first wife longer than he’s been married to his second. The thing is, I’m not against relationships — not at all.

I’ve committed to relationships in the past and, as much as I’m currently happily single, hope to do so again in the future. But my friends’ salutary experiences mean I’ll never make it legally binding, no matter how in love I might be.

I feel the same way about becoming a father: it’s just too risky while women wield all the power, not only over when and if children are conceived, but also over whether the man is allowed to continue to play a role in a child’s life.

Think about it. The minute a man ‘puts a ring on it’, as the song goes, he stands to lose his home, access to his children and a huge chunk of his pension, too.

Peter feels that marriage means losing your home, access to children and a chunk of pension

And nobody seems to bat an eyelid. When did you last hear of a man being the one to stay in the marital home, whether or not he pays the mortgage on it? What separated father do you know who gets to tuck his kids into bed every night? Meanwhile, the woman ending the marriage — and with 68 per cent of proceedings instigated by the woman, she’s the one most likely to — gets to walk away with a potential life-long meal ticket.

Mine might sound like a dystopian take on the world, but the depressing truth is that too often men who marry end up being treated as little more than sperm donors and cash machines. And so the best thing we can do to protect ourselves is not to bother in the first place.

Of the 106,959 divorces granted last year, 41,669 were initiated by men

The sad reality, as I see it, is that the writing’s on the wall from the moment a man proposes.

That’s when he gets sucked into a cripplingly expensive vortex, where getting married becomes more about the bride and an impending occasion than any emotional commitment.

What starts with an expensive diamond ring — typically costing at least £2,000 — evolves into the all-consuming organisation of an event where the groom plays little more than a walk-on role.

A wedding today typically costs £17,000 — my parents’ Sixties generation paid on average £50. And no matter how much you contribute financially, what you want out of that day is inconsequential, because remember, it’s not about you. At which point, a pattern is set.

Today's weddings cost around £17,000 once everything has been taken into account

Sadly, there’s even more bad news. Your sex life tends to dwindle after marriage.

A recent survey of 3,000 couples found that those who’d had sex four times a week before their wedding did it just once a week afterwards. Of course, you could argue that this has long been the case, and that my father was taking just as big a risk when he proposed to my mum.

But when they embarked on marriage, my parents shared the same expectations of it, while respecting what each was bringing to the table.

They worked as a team, with Dad the breadwinner and Mum happy to stay at home raising my three older sisters and me.

It’s an unfashionable opinion to express, but to me what they had was true equality.

Even if it happens to be the kind that modern feminism baulks at.

Peter Lloyd is the author of Stand By Your Manhood, which is available for £8.99 from all good bookshops.