Marriage

Looking forward, as one always must, I wonder if the law will eventually be changed to allow one to marry one’s dog. Until now, this would have been considered disgusting, since marriage has been a law revolving around sexual behaviour, and sexual acts with animals are still, I believe, illegal. But, as this column has pointed out, the unintended consequence of the same-sex marriage legislation has been to take sex out of marriage law. Civil servants, unable to define same-sex consummation, omitted it. So marriage, from now on, can mean no more than the legally registered decision of two people to live together while not being married to anyone else.

The Conservative party is trying to redefine marriage. I can’t believe they think they’re going to get away with this. Throughout human history it has been one thing, which is a loving commitment between two people who want to share a life. Now they’re trying to turn it into something completely different. A tax break. It wouldn’t benefit me, even though I am married. Although I swear that isn’t the root of my objection. Honest. My wife and I are in the same tax bracket, you see, so sharing our allowance wouldn’t make much difference. What it amounts to, really, is an incentive for one of us to stop working

Should the government subsidise married couples? Arguing about whether births outside wedlock lead to worse childhood outcomes, or whether broken homes and such outcomes both stem from some third factor, really depends on one’s worldview and which studies one chooses to ignore. My own suspicion, based on the wisdom of the ages and what I read in the Daily Mail, is that social and personal problems are likely to be more prevalent on average among those who have children out of wedlock, which makes proving the case for marriage hard. In addition, the actual absence of a father on average makes a difference. But how could this be proved except

Never mind all this gay stuff — when is parliament going to get on with the marriage legislation we really need? I’m talking about the law banning men from proposing to their girlfriends in public. It’s been happening for years. Local radio was always the worst offender. ‘Gareth, I think you’ve got something you want to say to Julie, haven’t you?’ the vapid Simon Bates wannabe would leer. In fact I blame Simon Bates for the whole phenomenon: he legitimised this mawkish sharing of supposedly private emotion. Those of you old enough to remember his ‘Our Tune’ feature on Radio 1 will know what I mean. To the rest of you

I was sitting on the stoop with a cigarette after dinner while my wife browsed the television channels to see if there was anything we might want to watch. Eventually she called out: ‘There’s Treblinka: Death Camp Survivors. Or The Vicar of Dibley. Up to you – I can’t decide.’ I just thought I’d share that domestic moment with you.

The right of gays to have a civil marriage in a non-religious service is once again an issue. There have been large and slightly violent protests in Paris as well as on-going judicial contortions in the US. I know my support for gay marriage appears to put me in a minority among conservatives. But perhaps I could ask a question of my opponents? One of the things that opponents of gay civil marriage always say is that gay marriage would ‘undermine’, ‘distort’ or otherwise ‘demean’ existing marriage. Many people – continuing to mix up civil and religious marriage – claim that the ‘sanctity’ of religious heterosexual marriage will be undermined

Watching the shipwreck of the Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce court case has made me feel guiltily relieved that, at the age of 42, I haven’t yet married. The operatic scale of the disaster makes it appear emblematic of all the other couples who make each other unhappy all the time in smaller, less dramatic ways. That two people can bind themselves together for life, raise five children together and yet remain so emotionally unintelligent about each other and the world in which they live says several things to me. It makes me think that they may have got married for the wrong reasons, most likely because they were young

There’s another one of those fatuous “studies” in the papers today, based upon that favourite newspaper device, the false correlation. This time it’s about marriage; if you want to make your marriage work, move to Dorset, because part of it has the highest number of married couples in the country and they are more likely to stay married. The implication is that there must be something magical about Dorset, and that if you moved to, say, Wimborne, or Curry Rivel, any marital problems you might have had would immediately evaporate. Of course the reason more people are married in Dorset is that the average age of the population there is

The disadvantage of live phone-in radio programmes is precisely that you don’t get to weigh your words. No doubt Nick Clegg would have expressed himself a bit differently on the subject of a transferable married couple’s tax allowance if he hadn’t had the subject thrown at him by a caller. But in response to a question on the issue, he said: ‘The more people will look at this, the more they will think… why should you be giving, whatever it is, £3 a week to married couples?’  Naturally, people took this as indicative of just how out of touch the ruling elite is from everyone else… three pounds a week?