Coleridge's impractical marriage message

“However wonderful and exciting a relationship is, you can’t sustain it at that level; and that is the reality. Soon you find the new partner is as flawed as the last.” If this is the new messiah for marriage, I’d hate to hear a critic. Sir Paul Coleridge, a senior High Court judge, was talking about his new campaign to promote marriage: which you do, apparently, not by extolling the virtues of matrimony but by ramping up the futility of seeking the happy-ever-after with anybody at all.

Sir Paul is keen to stress that his approach to the marriage question is not “moralistic,” but “practical.” But how is it even possible to have a campaign promoting marriage without engaging with the moral question? If you’re going to convince people to stay in marriages that they feel like leaving, the least you can do is to make an argument as to why marriage is a better way to live than the alternatives. That means tempering lawyerly “practicalities” with a belief in the power of love and the virtue of commitment, and engaging in moral debates rather than instrumental exhortations to “recycle your rubbish, but be very slow to recycle your partner.”

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny (Imprint Academic, 2009) and Maybe I Do: Marriage and Commitment in Singleton Society (Institute of Ideas, 2002), and co-author of Licensed to Hug (Civitas, 2010).