Hope for committed relationships

We ran across an encour­ag­ing com­men­tary by Eleanor Mills on the Times On-Line Web­site, enti­tled “I mar­ried for money, The pain of divorce poi­soned me against mar­riage for a long time. But now I find I have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive”.

In her com­men­tary Ms Mills says

“I am a prod­uct of the divorce Olympics. By the age of six I had attended both of my par­ents’ sec­ond mar­riages … Given my par­ents’ expe­ri­ence, I thought mar­riage wasn’t worth the paper the cer­tifi­cate was printed on. Like many oth­ers of my gen­er­a­tion, I thought it was cooler and more real to be with some­one because we were in love.

I changed my mind for dull, prac­ti­cal rea­sons. I dis­cov­ered while I was preg­nant that if I died, the father of my child wouldn’t get my pen­sion if we weren’t mar­ried. I also realised that, unmar­ried, he would have few rights over our child. We’d been together six years, had a mighty joint mort­gage and a baby on the way. For the first time I won­dered what I was try­ing to prove by not being mar­ried (and some­where in the back of my mind was my grand­mother boast­ing about how all her grand­chil­dren had been born in wed­lock … in some until then unno­ticed part of my brain, I realised I did want to be mar­ried when I had my baby).

Sud­denly, get­ting hitched seemed the prac­ti­cal and sen­si­ble thing to do - so we did it on a scorch­ing day in Oxford reg­is­ter office, with two wit­nesses. Hav­ing been very blasé about the whole thing, I found the real­ity absurdly mov­ing. I cried the entire way through the cer­e­mony. Corny as it sounds, it was the hap­pi­est day of my life.

Mar­riage, I dis­cov­ered rather to my sur­prise, really does make a dif­fer­ence: I feel more set­tled, more secure. In our lives, which are filled with so many options (I used to joke that it was almost a tyranny of choice), tak­ing a deci­sion, a com­mit­ment in a no-going-back kind of way, felt good. I am proud to talk about my hus­band and I like hav­ing the same name as my chil­dren. We are a fam­ily, a unit; for­sak­ing all other (maybe that, too, is eas­ier when you marry later). I hope we’ll be together for ever…”

Read the entire column.

Is Still Here & Still Here Too