I am a child of unhappily divorced people. Apparently, there are happily divorced people, but I have always thought they were a myth; an invention of advertisers, who need people to always be happy, even in extremis. Your heart can be in pieces, but how well you wear a cashmere shrug and gambol with a puppy!

For me, it was like growing up filled with emotional shrapnel. I didn’t think I would get married, although I always wanted to. I felt incapable of trust. I was love-shy. I am married now, although I do not know if I will stay married. Does anyone really know if they will survive? The fractures between us are large and growing. Sometimes we fill them in, and sometimes not. Perhaps one day we will no longer want to.

I always had a ghoulish interest in marriage though – and in divorce. It was a secret and unacknowledged obsession, which I tried to pretend I was above. Before I was married I would haunt wedding shows deliberately – and insultingly. (I was born to a woman who would shout at random brides, helpfully: “Don’t do it!”) I was jealous, and contemptuous. But I wanted to get married, and for bad reasons. I wanted to get married to show I was not broken. I wanted to get married to prove I was wanted.

For that is what marriage is: the universal sign of being wanted, and settled, and loved. Nothing exposes your needs – and defects – like relationships. When I became engaged at 39 I expected congratulations, for, as my husband said, quoting Louis CK, he was the last branch I clung to as I fell out of the tree, and I married him, at least partially, because he said things like that. He knew things about me that I didn’t. My friends treated me like a bad investment that had, suddenly and miraculously, produced a dividend.

Too often, you come to the most important relationship of your adult life like a child, with all a child’s needs, hopes and fears. So, I have been asking people why they got divorced. It’s a curiously intimate question if you really dig in, and ask how they felt, rather than what happened. What were you seeking and how did you feel when it didn’t show up?

‘The generation who married 30 years ago divorced almost en masse.’ Photograph: Mike Kemp/Getty Images

There are fewer divorces these days. In September, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed that, in England and Wales in 2017, only 8.4 per 1,000 opposite-sex couples got divorced. That is a 6% decrease from 2016, and the lowest rate of divorce since 1973, the year I was born.

That was a bumper year for divorce (37% of those who married that year separated), as was 1993 (41%). Of those divorcing, most are in their early 40s, and the most likely length of a marriage is 12.2 years. It dies, most often then, in adolescence.

It is different for same-sex couples; total divorces leapt from 112 to 338 over the same year. But this is not surprising. Same-sex marriage was only legalised in England and Wales in March 2014. (It came nine months later in Scotland and, typically, in Northern Ireland, that chilly outpost of bigotry, not at all). To have the chance to get divorced, you have to have the chance to get married first. It is equality of opportunity, misery – and hope. They will catch up.

So, divorce is declining. But why? Is it a new era of tolerance, or poverty? Plenty of people are too poor to get divorced. Two households are more expensive than one. And a later marriage – which is fashionable – often means a more effective marriage, because the child’s impossible dreams are further off – and smaller.

He was the last branch I clung to as I fell out of the tree

The average age for a man to marry is 30; for a woman it is 28. Thirty years ago, it was 25 and 23, and it is that generation who got divorced almost en masse. The more mature you are upon marriage, the less scope there is for disappointment. But the main reason that divorce is dying is that marriage is dying – and that is good.

Marriage, for affluent women in western democracies, is a happy dream, and who doesn’t love dreams? A princess dress is, after all, hardly the costume of a secure and grounded adult.

I have always thought a wedding was a very peculiar, and expensive, type of narcotic – and who doesn’t love narcotics? I wore black to my wedding, as if I was already anticipating being a widow. Was I so fearful of disappointment I simply cursed myself instead?

“I want,” one young woman told me of her forthcoming wedding day, “everyone to look at me. I feel I’ve been quite overlooked in my life. My brother and sister are so happy and golden. I’m the dark person in the corner reading Harry Potter. I like that – it feels safe – but for one day I’d quite like the spotlight on me.”

Almost no one agreed to be named in this article. But I don’t mind them being anonymous, as long as they are honest.

So, it is narcotic. And, like a narcotic, it should be unnecessary; an optional choice, like ribbons, or a string quartet on a wedding day. Because necessary narcotics just trap you, they lie to you, and then, when there isn’t much left of you, they kill you.

Too much marriage, I fear, has been the result of too much Jane Austen, and although she wrote a lot about marriage, she never did it herself. (Now that is satire.) Women should not need marriage for financial security and social status and, increasingly, they don’t.

Often, marriage makes women poorer, because it creates dependents. I am as far from my mother’s generation – in which rape within marriage was not criminal and to get a mortgage without a husband was as likely as setting up house in a rainbow, or a shoe – as the biblical women who married their dead husband’s brothers.

Newcomers: the divorce rate for same-sex couples is growing as more people get married in the first place. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

The extent to which people seek out their childhood relationships in adult life – for you are always born to a relationship – is remarkable. The artist Alice Gorton – one of the few people I spoke to who was willing to be named – got married at 24, and she told me: “I have role models in my life that made me naturally confident in the idea of marriage,” she says. “Both sets of grandparents have celebrated their diamond wedding anniversaries. My parents are at 28 years and still very much in love.” For her, marriage could only be wonderful. She expects to be loved, and she is loved. If you expect to be wounded, you will be wounded. If you expect to be ignored, you will be ignored.

I continued to ask people why they got married and, sometimes, why they then got divorced. The answers I was given were blunt, and often agonising.

Many women say they thought they had married adults, but got children instead. Children with whom they had children. So, they worked while the husband played guitar – or with Lego – and eventually, when they couldn’t bear it any more, they left, because it was better to be alone. Or they sabotaged their own marriages with adultery, or drink. Or they got bored – the narcotic, in this case, had stopped working. Or they fell in love with other people. Or their husbands beat them up, or gambled, or spent their money and beat the children, or just left them for someone else.

One couple I spoke to are planning to get divorced, but are waiting, for some reason, until after Brexit. Perhaps they want the world to crash in sympathy with them.

The people who stay together, though, are the ones who are mature or dedicated enough to solve problems together. You can survive anything if you feel like you are in it together. Empathy – and forgiveness – is everything. If not, then all the human catastrophes – illness, bereavement, infidelity and penury – will tear you apart. You need to be able to tolerate disappointment, and that is why I didn’t want a white wedding. The gulf between expectation and reality cannot be too large. You might fall in.

The family lawyer I speak to insists there is, from the legal profession, every attempt to settle. It’s the couples who won’t, even if the contested divorce is almost unheard of nowadays. Tini Owens was told this year, by the supreme court, that she could not divorce her husband of 40 years until 2020. He, quite monstrously, wouldn’t have it, and so she must wait the five years the law requires, except in cases of desertion, adultery or unreasonable behaviour (which used to be called cruelty). But Owens is almost unique. Usually people release each other from the contract, albeit raging.

There is, says the lawyer, so much scope for argument, and so much anger. It blinds people even to their own interests. They want to fight, because they are disappointed, and anger, at least initially, is easier to feel than grief. You can stand up when you’re angry. It makes you feel powerful. People, the lawyer says, fight over ridiculous things, like kitchen utensils, and bedding, and stuffed birds. They fight over washing machines, and pets, and children, and who was wrong.

Even if divorce rates are lowering, is it avoidable entirely? The relationship counsellor Noa Rockman believes it often is, and we choose, on the whole, relationships that test us, and save us. But sometimes we don’t want to be saved, or we can’t.

A choice of partner is never accidental. “Our unmet needs, hurts and losses are registered in us as emotional energy knots,” Rockman says, “depriving us of parts of our vitality and compromising our fulfilment. In those areas in ourselves – and in overflow to other parts of our lives – we don’t live. We survive.”

“But,” she adds, “we have a drive to heal those wounds. This is where romantic relationships become very handy – as the stage for the healing drama. We are unconsciously drawn to partners who fit the template with whom we would be able to recreate the childhood nightmare. So, we can have a second go”.

If this sounds glorious, it sometimes isn’t.

Romantic relationships become handy as the stage for the healing drama

“Tragically and far too often,” she says, “just when we have managed to recreate the nightmare, we pull out. This is where people decide to divorce. It makes sense: they find themselves in the heart of the nightmare, without the understanding or the tools to do things differently. It’s such a tragedy: people are working so hard to create the circumstances that will allow them to heal from the wounds but then, at the peak of their opportunity, they remove themselves from it.”

If this is true – and people know it – will divorce cease to exist? I doubt it, because dreams are in our nature, and the pull of the past is strong, even if you were not there.

I wonder if the beginnings, and endings, of relationships are really a generation ago? And so back, and back, and if that is why, when we speak of love, we so often speak of destiny?

Not everyone, as Rockman says, can bear the strain of renewal through recognition – I mean pain – or even know why they behave the way they do. It was shocking how, in the earliest fights of our marriage, my husband and I tried to impose our parents’ marriages on our own, even if my parents were already divorced, and his already dead. I threw things and wept tears enough to fill a bath. He was always quiet – and he baked. We had to learn to be ourselves in marriage. We are still learning.

I trust in civil partnerships because they are less mad than weddings, and therefore less fun. At least on the day. But they are weighted with fewer expectations and in that, I think, is hope.

• This article was amended on 9 December 2018. It originally referred to same-sex divorce rates as being per 1,000 marriages when in fact they were total figures. This has been corrected, and it now also specifies that the ONS divorce data relates to England and Wales.