How ‘out of wedlock’ went from an insult to an aspiration
Maria Bataller has been with her partner for more than a decade. The couple share a house, a dog, two children and a business. “But”, says the 36-year-old entrepreneur from Cambridge, “we never got married. We always had other priorities, like travelling around the world, house extension and renovations, kids, then starting a business together. It's not in our plans to get married.”
She belongs to a growing cohort of young adults who no longer view marriage as a key life event. Not so long ago, the big white wedding was a rite of passage, and one that came before children. Today? Not so much.
New research suggests female graduates in the US are now six times more likely to have their first baby out of wedlock than they were 25 years ago. Almost one in four women in their 30s with a degree has their first child outside of marriage, up from just four per cent in 1996, according to the findings. Prof Andrew Cherlin, who led the study at Johns Hopkins University, surmised that “the place of marriage in the sequence of life events for emerging adulthood may be shifting”.
Unlike their parents, today’s young adults “may postpone or forgo marriage until and unless they have attained certain economic markers such as home ownership or an income comparable to the married couples around them,” said Prof Cherlin.
My millennial generation and those born after it don’t appear to see it as the non-negotiable starting point it once was. For the most part we face no stigma for having a baby first. Consider the shift in the language we use: no longer would a child born out of wedlock be referred to as a “bastard”. The very phrase “out of wedlock” is out of date.
When my then-boyfriend proposed, I said yes, then waited two days before making my own proposal. “How about we have a baby first and then get married?” Children had always been higher up my list of life priorities. My now-husband argued we needn’t rush into parenting. Who won the debate? Well, our son arrived nine months later.
Prof Cherlin found that of all 30-something women who had their first child outside of marriage, those with university degrees were the most likely to be married at the time of their second birth – as was the case for me.
But a growing number are ambivalent about whether they will bother with marriage at all.
Anniki Sommerville, a mother of two and author of How to Be a Boss at Ageing who is among the growing cohort of happily unmarried, says among her parent friends the married are in the minority. Her seven-year-old sometimes asks her if they’ll ever marry, but she can never give a definite answer.
“I went through a wave of going to friends’ weddings and having that feeling of ‘oh, I must get married because everyone else seems to be’. Then that wave passed,” she says.
But in the UK the landscape may be somewhat more complex. Brienna Perelli-Harris, professor of demography at the University of Southampton and contributor to the Understanding Society project, says that over here, although childbearing within unmarried cohabitation is increasing among highly educated women, it is growing even more among the less educated.
“Often what happens is the highly educated become more liberal and accepting in their attitudes but their behaviours don’t necessarily change,” she says. “It’s the low educated people who are having a harder time finding the stability that’s needed for the commitment of marriage.”
Prof Perelli-Harris is about to publish a paper showing relationship quality is still associated with marriage too. “So people who are happier in their partnerships are more likely to get married,” she says.
As for whether it’s men or women who are driving the shift away from marriage, she suggests the evidence is mixed.
Either way, the playing field is still entirely uneven for the married and unmarried. Kate Daly, co-founder of Amicable, a lawyer-free divorce service, warns the biggest mistake people make is assuming there is such a thing as common law marriage. “There are no rights or protections [associated with cohabitation],” she says.
Say you’ve moved into a house owned by your partner and your name isn’t on the deeds: if the relationship breaks down, “you can find yourself homeless with a child,” says Daly. Likewise if you have prioritised raising children while your partner worked: “All of a sudden you can be left without retirement benefits and no right to claim against your partner’s retirement benefits.”
After no-fault divorce comes into effect from next April, allowing for a divorce without either party attributing fault or lengthy separation periods, reforming these problems around cohabitation will be the next social campaign, adds Daly. But she fears it could take some time. “It’s an area where the law just hasn’t kept pace with where society has got to and how we want to live our lives today.”
