‘I don’t have any friends’ – so how will they marry?
Last week, the Institute for Public Policy Research published the saddest set of numbers I have read in a long time. Among 16 to 21-year-olds in England, 1 in every 20 now say they have no close friends at all. That is five times as many as a decade ago. Enough to make you weep.
All of that is of course upstream of everything we stand for at C4M because you can’t select a marital partner from a group of close friends you never had.
Yet, encouragingly, these young people overwhelmingly do still want to marry, shown in survey after survey. In July, the United Nations Population Fund asked 108,926 young adults across 73 countries what their ideal future looked like. Seven in ten said marriage, with only nine per cent wanting to live together and never marry. Given the choice, young people are not asking for meaningless hook-ups. They’re asking for marriage.
Where this all leads is evident before our eyes. England and Wales recorded a fertility rate of only 1.39 children per woman last year. The country needs 2.1 simply to replace its numbers. And what little our country does about it, is not genuinely aimed at families. A nursery place for a nine-month-old, for example, is not there to help a family. It is just a way of getting his mother back to work early to boost GDP. So when it comes to fixing the step before – whether or not a young man and woman ever meet – the least the State could do is to speak well of marriage, but it can’t even do that. I went looking for even one minister who had said a single good word for marriage in the last two years, but found none.
The social science points out one other thing worth noting here. Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard has spent years on what actually predicts how a life goes, and he finds that turning up to a religious service is associated with “an increased likelihood of subsequently making new friends, of marrying”. But even that one institution, shown to produce both friendships and marriages, is one the country is quietly walking out of. Christian identification has fallen from 66 per cent to 38 per cent since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983.
So here’s what C4M is doing about it. In addition to our pre-marriage and marriage courses, we run a course for single people called What to Look For When Looking. It’s about how to recognise someone worth marrying, and how to become someone worth marrying yourself. And it gets young people in the room. I come and lead it myself, anywhere in the country, and we fit round the organiser’s diary rather than the other way about. There is no charge for any of it. If there’s a church, a group or a workplace near you that would host it this autumn or next spring, reply to this email and let’s find a date.
Seven in ten of the young still want what C4M exists to defend – real marriage. They’re not the problem. What has gone is the culture of meeting and communicating, and the esteemed role of marriage in society. But the youth want it back, and we’re here to help them get it.