Marriage was one of the greatest social evils it was fashionable to denounce when, briefly, I was an idealistic left-wing student. There was little worse for society, according to radical 1968 convention, than the repressive, bourgeois, nuclear family. Marriage, like the social structures it supported, was the enemy of freedom, equality, authenticity and self-expression. It gave rise to some of the most painful of civilisation’s discontents. It was a tool of hierarchical capitalist oppression.

“Damn braces, bless relaxes,” students used to say, quoting Blake without the least idea of what he meant. It is true, however, that marriage is not always relaxing, and often all too bracing, and in that half-educated muddle there was some uncomfortable truth.

Whether anyone still thinks like that I have no idea. But marriage has never been more unpopular. Last week the Office for National Statistics announced that the proportion of adults in England and Wales who choose to marry has fallen to the lowest rate since figures were first recorded in 1862.

Just under 23 in every 1,000 unmarried men got married last year; the figure for women is fewer than 21. The figures also showed that 44% of babies are born out of marriage, rising to 55% in the northeast. Getting married in the UK as a whole is in marked decline, from a peak in 1972, at around the time when the sixty-eighters were most vociferously denouncing it and beginning their long march through the institutions. As for staying married, the divorce rate for new couples is about 45%.

This is gloomy news for those who have always believed, or who have recently come to believe (in the light of the overwhelming evidence), that marriage – all in all – is good for people and for society, or at least much better than the alternatives. That argument has recently been conclusively won, although not so long ago marriage was the love that dared not speak its name.

A middle-aged nurse wrote to me a few years ago saying that hospital management had told her not to use the words husband and wife when speaking to patients and staff, not even when referring to her own husband of many years and not even on official forms. Only the word “partner” was acceptable, for fear of offending the unmarried.

As to why marriage has become so unpopular, explanations are legion. Some people emphasise more than I would the iconoclastic attitudes of the 1960s. Others point to fiscal disincentives to getting or staying married, especially among people with low incomes. Many people find themselves noticeably better off if they are single parents, if they pretend to be, or if they abandon a marriage when the going gets tough. And it now no longer needs to be said that there is also no social stigma in avoiding marriage by cohabitation or abandoning it through divorce. Even Princess Anne’s daughter lives openly with her bulky boyfriend: 30 years ago that would have been a scandal.

However, I think there is another factor that must be part of the explanation, although I don’t know of any academic evidence for it. I suspect one of the main reasons why people don’t get married, or can’t stay married, particularly in lower social groups, is because so many people aren’t properly socialised. They aren’t, in better English, properly brought up, and in some cases are hardly brought up at all, or are left to bring each other up without much adult guidance. This is happening not to a minority but to a majority of British children.

Socialisation, or upbringing, is the complex process through which a child learns to be a social being – a responsible, considerate, self-disciplined, forbearing adult, who is capable of unselfish love and loyalty. That is to say, incidentally or perhaps not so incidentally, an adult who is capable of putting the best into and getting the best out of marriage.

It is hard to raise a child into such a social being. It takes a huge amount of time and effort. Increasingly it seems parents can’t or won’t spend time and care on their children. Increasingly both parents are working; increasingly single parents are anxious, harried and time-poor; increasingly children are consigned to inadequate day care and nurseries; increasingly they are offered wraparound educare (promoted by Gordon Brown). Increasingly we see the results.

Evidence of the failures of this childcare – or child neglect – is constantly emerging. Recent Ofsted reports of preschool nurseries were alarming. Infants are neglected, disoriented and distressed; children in day care are more likely to have disturbed and aggressive behaviour, and half of all toddlers arrive at primary school unable to speak properly for their age. Their numbers are growing. To say this suggests a widespread failure of socialisation is surely an understatement.

By five, a great deal of damage has been done. It only remains for poor schools, large classes, uncontrolled bullying and inaccessible parents, truanting, empty homes, solitary TV and the lonely refuge of cyberspace to reinforce it. The government recently felt obliged to advise parents to read aloud to their children because so many wouldn’t think of doing so.

It is hardly possible for a child who has been so socially deprived, by any combination of these all too normal experiences, to learn how to treat other people. Not all children turn into feral teenagers because of such disadvantages, but many may well turn into children who are emotionally and socially stunted, children who have fallen on stony ground and can never thrive.

Such children can hardly hope to achieve much of the maturity and emotional stability that is essential to marriage. And I say marriage, because all the evidence is that cohabitation is no substitute for it. And why not marry, if one wants to take on all the rights and responsibilities of marriage?

Children tend to do as they are done by. If they are properly brought up, they will bring up their own children to the same high standards. If not, not. If their parents set them an example of good behaviour and a loyal marriage, they will do the same for the next generation. If not, not. The decline of marriage is an inevitable consequence of the decline of parenthood.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk

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