IN A CLASSROOM in southern England, a group of 17-year-old girls has just learned something extraordinary. The pupils are interviewing a couple, Jane and Graham Marshall, who have been sent to their school by the Students Exploring Marriage Trust, a charity that tries to promote wedlock by providing teenagers with real-life examples. Mr Marshall has mentioned that he has been married to Mrs Marshall for 48 years. “Aww,” say the girls. Then they stop to think, because Jane and Graham do not look terribly old. Hold on, asks one pupil after a few seconds—how old were you when you got married? Nineteen, says Mr Marshall. The pupils gasp. “Whoa!” says one.

It is a long cultural journey from half a century ago to the present. Out of every 1,000 unmarried adult women living in England and Wales in 1970, whether single, divorced or widowed, 60 got hitched. Women married for the first time at a median age of 21, to men who were two years older. One-third of brides under 20 were bounced into marriage, with a baby arriving less than eight months after the wedding. To have a child outside wedlock was almost unthinkable.

These days the marriage rate in England and Wales is just 21 per 1,000 single women in any one year. The median age at first marriage has climbed to 30 for women and 31 for men. Having children outside marriage is almost the norm. Fully 48% of English and Welsh babies were born to unmarried mothers in 2016, up from 8% in 1970.

Marriage is no longer thought essential, even for raising children. Even so, Britons seem to idealise marriage more than ever. A once universal institution has become the mark of having made it, both romantically and economically. Among the privileged group of people who attain wedlock—call them the uxariat—marriage is becoming more egalitarian and more resilient. These changes are reflected in wedding ceremonies, in the division of housework and in bed.

NatCen Social Research, an independent institute, has been surveying Britons’ attitudes to sex and marriage since the early 1980s. In almost every respect, it finds that people are becoming more liberal. In 2016, for example, 75% of Britons declared that premarital sex was not wrong at all, up from 42% in 1983. With each passing survey, fewer people say that couples who want children ought to marry first. But there is an important exception to this easy-going rule. All Britons, especially young ones, now take a more critical view of affairs. Marriage seems ever less necessary but also ever more inviolate.

An ever-shrinking share of the population embarks on it. In the first quarter of 2017, 65% of top professional adults in Britain were married, according to the Labour Force Survey. For people in routine jobs the proportion was 44%, and for the unemployed and those who had never worked 40%. Among women with young children the social divide is even sharper. The Marriage Foundation, a charity, calculates that 87% of women in the highest-earning quintile with children under five are married, compared with only 24% in the lowest-earning quintile.

It is not quite accurate to say that in Britain the rich marry and the poor do not. Rather, marriage is favoured by well-off people and some ethnic minorities, especially immigrants and the offspring of immigrants from countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Somalia, which have strong marriage cultures. The part of Britain with the lowest proportion of births outside marriage, at 20%, is Harrow, a middle-class London suburb where less than one-third of the population is white British. The highest rate, at 75%, is in Knowsley, a poor suburb of Liverpool where 19 out of 20 people are white Britons.

Laura and Richard, a middle-class couple in their late 20s living in Leeds, will marry next year. Both are clear about the proper order: marriage first, then children. They are less clear about why they believe this. Laura is Catholic but Richard is not, and she does not ascribe her views to her faith. “It’s just how I’ve always thought I want my life to be,” she says. It is probably significant, though, that almost everybody she and Richard know has done the same thing.

As marriage becomes the preserve of such careful people, unions are growing more resilient. If you wanted it to last, the worst years to marry in England and Wales, statistically, were in the mid-1990s. Among those who tied the knot in 1996, 11% had split up by the fifth year of marriage and 25% by the tenth. Couples who married a decade later are faring better. Among those who wed in 2006, 8% had split by their fifth year and 20% by their tenth year. More recent cohorts seem to be even more steadfast.

Much the same is happening in other countries. Across Europe, except in Belgium, highly educated women are less likely to have children outside marriage. In America education and marriage go hand-in-hand, to the extent that marriage rates are now higher among women with PhDs than among women with bachelor’s degrees. At the age of 45, the average university-educated American man has led a fairly straightforward personal life. Fully 88% of such men have married, and three-quarters of those are still married to their first wives. Men who did not finish high school are less likely to have married and, if they have, more likely to have divorced (see chart).

The marrying classes have become ever better at picking partners who are similar to them. Three academic economists, Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié and Yoram Weiss, have shown that white Americans are increasingly likely to marry partners of the same educational level. This trend is sometimes ascribed to the growing numbers of female graduates, but the economists control for that and still find evidence of growing selectivity. Other studies show that women tend to marry men who share their attitude to financial risk, and that people with similar levels of parental wealth tend to end up together.

These marriages of social and educational equals seem to be satisfying, especially for women—who, at least in Britain, drive divorce trends. Since 1979 British men have consistently filed between 38,000 and 48,000 divorce petitions per year. Women, by contrast, went from filing 96,000 petitions in 1979 to 118,000 in 1993, before dropping to 65,000 in 2016.

Perhaps husbands have become less objectionable. Academics at Oxford University have shown that although women still do more housework than men, the gap has narrowed everywhere. In 1974 British women cleaned, cooked and laundered for 172 hours a year more than men. By 2005 they were putting in only 74 hours more. In America, the difference between the time married working women and men spent doing housework each day fell from 38 to 28 minutes between 2003-06 and 2011-15.

Be fair

Not only are men behaving better; women increasingly prize better behaviour among men. Daniel Carlson, a sociologist at the University of Utah, has shown that couples (whether married or cohabiting) who share child care and housework duties more equally report greater satisfaction in their relationships and in their sex lives. In the 1980s and 1990s the opposite was true. Men and women used to be content to specialise—he paying the mortgage, she changing the nappies. No longer.

For those who achieve it, marriage increasingly looks like a triumph. More than in the past, it is a fulfilling union between two people who collaborate (if still rather unequally) in child care, housework and money-earning. Almost all couples now live together before they marry, so people are well aware of what their partners expect of them. Most will have several more years to fine-tune their behaviour before the arrival of children.

Weddings have come to express this triumphant view. Now that couples are older and wealthier, gifts are downplayed: some ask for donations to a favourite charity. Brides and grooms splash out on lavish ceremonies that demonstrate their devotion to each other. Mathilde Robert, managing director of Planet Weddings, has been organising ceremonies for British couples in Cyprus and Greece since the early 1990s. In the early years, she says, most of her clients were middle-aged and marrying for the second time. They had money and wanted to treat themselves; most invited only a few guests. These days most of her clients are marrying for the first time and invite dozens of people. The majority pay for the wedding themselves.

There is, however, a cost to this kind of marriage. If you insist on a strong relationship and a healthy bank balance before tying the knot, and on piling up even more wealth before starting a family, your chances of having the number of children you want become slimmer. In most rich countries, the more highly qualified the woman, the more likely she is to remain childless. Many childless people are perfectly happy. But others endure expensive medical treatment and great disappointment.

Little wonder, then, that many people choose a different trade-off. In another paper, Mr Carlson examines what a mixed-race cohort of young Americans expected of life when they were interviewed in 1979 and what actually happened to them. Their aspirations were almost identical. Fully 98% of whites and Hispanics and 94% of blacks expected to marry, and all reckoned they would embark on parenthood at 23 or 24. White Americans hit the first target, more or less—90% ended up marrying—but were, on average, three years late in having children. Blacks and Hispanics, who in America are disproportionately working-class, came closer to hitting their ideal child-bearing age but fell far short of their marriage targets. Only 83% of Hispanics and 68% of blacks ended up marrying.

“Poor people and rich people want the same things,” says Kathryn Edin, who studies the romantic lives of impoverished Americans. If anything, she says, the least fortunate cling most tightly to a romantic marriage ideal. Faced with messy reality, though, people of different means prioritise different things. Poor women tend to put children above marriage, largely because the men they might marry are not up to much.

A lost world

For a glimpse of working-class life and love in the mid-20th century, there is little better than Stan Barstow’s British novel of 1960, “A Kind of Loving”. Its protagonist, Vic Brown, is dragged into a miserable marriage after he gets his 18-year-old girlfriend pregnant. If that seems like an account of a lost world, so is the labour market depicted in the novel. Characters walk out of stable jobs and into new ones with ease. At one point, a man who has been chastised by his boss for fighting calmly takes out a newspaper and runs his finger down the job advertisements.

These days a pregnant 18-year-old would probably not marry her boyfriend even if he asked. He may well be incapable of supporting her and the baby, and she has better options outside marriage than she did in 1960. Jobs for thinly educated men have become insecure and unrewarding. In America, wages for men who did not complete high school fell by 32% in real terms between 1979 and 2015; and men who finished high school but did not go to university earned 19% less than they did. Women fared somewhat better: pay for female school dropouts fell by 10%, whereas pay for those who finished high school was up by 4%.

That bleak economic reality helps to explain why attempts to promote marriage have such a dismal record. America’s federal government has given hundreds of millions of dollars to programmes that seek to nudge poor people into wedlock or teach couples how to resolve conflict. These programmes have been found to have hardly any effect.

Conservatives point out that none of the barriers to marriage in Western societies are insurmountable. It is not necessary to have a lavish wedding. A man who sometimes drops out of work might nonetheless prove a good husband and father. Poverty does not in itself prevent anybody from tying the knot—at least not in Western countries. In China it does.