“Strengthen marriage” – a Norwegian’s answer to UK ministers
In Norway, fewer than four in ten children are now born to married parents. Marriage – the lifelong union of one man and one woman, and the gold standard for families and society – simply stopped being the ordinary way to have a child. Per Christian Gustavsen watched it happen. He is one of the founders of a Norwegian resource centre for marriage and the family, in one of the richest and most secular countries on earth, and he has six children of his own. He sat down with me, and you can watch our conversation here.
Norway is “a prosperous nation”, Gustavsen says, where children “can have whatever they want”. And still his verdict is flat. “The children are suffering.”
Here in Britain, by the age of five, 15 per cent of children of married parents have seen them separate, against 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents. The difference is a public promise.
Our own ministers are consulting on handing unmarried couples the rights of marriage automatically, and they assure us marriage is safe in their hands. Norway already has a similar laws, and the results have not been good.
We want better for unmarried Mums and Dads than just living together – and better is marriage. It is open to every one of them today, and everything it protects comes with it. For couples who find it out of reach, the answer is to bring it closer – not to hand out its rewards without its promise. What we oppose is the state treating couples as married who never chose to be, and calling that kindness. You do not uphold marriage by building its replacement.
Regarding the cohabitation proposals, I asked Gustavsen what he would say to British ministers. He did not reach for a quick fix. “I would strongly recommend that you rather strengthen marriage.”
That is no slogan for him. A resource centre that only argues is no use, he says: “I had to do it by example”. Love does not come in instalments – give 90 per cent, or 70, and it fails. You have to be “all in”. When explaining the best thing he could do for his six children, he did not point to the centre he founded. He said: “love my wife”.
He is right, and it goes to the heart of everything. A daughter learns what to expect from a man by watching how her father treats her mother. A son learns what he will one day be. That is how marriage spreads, or fails to – not by argument, but by being seen, in ordinary houses, by children nobody was consciously teaching. We are raising the grandmothers and grandfathers of the future, and they are watching us now.
Gustavsen is not despairing. Nor am I. He sees a generation coming up who “want to find the truth” and will not swallow what the last one did. The numbers in this country say the same thing: 86 per cent of unmarried women under thirty want to marry, and 80 per cent of unmarried men. Norway and Britain have a choice – help them make the right one.