The problem with political parties lazily banging on about “the family” all the time, as though the nuclear model were the remedy for all society’s ills, is that anyone even slightly observant can’t have failed to notice that the traditional family is in dire straits.
I’m all for families, and for children being brought up in secure, loving environments – who isn’t? – but I get tremendously irritated when it is suggested, as it so often is, that having two parents under the same roof somehow magically guarantees a Janet and John kind of childhood, free of risk or trauma, and that having just the one parent is a recipe for impending hoodie-druggie-gun disaster.
It’s such a load of guff. What actually matters, to children and adults alike, is having happy, contented parents whose felicity communicates itself to their children. Whether the happy parents are happy together or happier separated, and whether the family is the 2.3 version or a more seemingly chaotic model filled with steps and halves and honorary aunties, seems to me completely irrelevant. It’s simple: a happy parent makes for a happy child, and a miserable one communicates misery to his or her offspring – not just occasionally, but for decades on end.
My theory has met with some resistance in the past, though goodness knows why (actually I do know why: it’s because unhappily married people are incredibly defensive). But anyway, I knew I was right, and a survey of married couples last week backs me right up. An amazing 59% of married women said they would leave their husbands tomorrow if they could be assured of economic stability. Half of the husbands questioned defined their marriage as “loveless”.
More than 10% of men and women said they wished they had married someone else; 12% said they would stay in an unhappy relationship for an easy life; 30% said they were staying in a doomed marriage to save themselves the hassle of an upheaval; 37% said they were staying put for the sake of the children; 42% worried about losing their home if they broke up; a third of those polled were worried they would be left with nothing if they walked away; and 30% of men said they were scared of leaving their children behind.
Nearly half of the couples questioned (by a firm of solicitors, after a rush of divorce applications in the first week of the new year) said they would stay with their unsatisfactory partner “for the sake of the family unit”, even though 35% believed their marriage would turn stale in the future.
I’m quoting the figures at such length because I find them almost incredible. Either the 2,000 people polled are unrepresentative freaks – unlikely – or the level of domestic dissatisfaction, of everyday low-level misery, in this country is truly astounding. And yet it is never honestly discussed.
Instead, we get a load of blather about how important it is for society for us to all play house nicely. And we dutifully comply, smugly congratulating ourselves on our married status, hissing at heroic single parents, and push away the niggling feeling that this nuclear family malarkey is actually making us – or a significant proportion of us – feel unhappy and trapped.
This isn’t about love: it boils down to money in the end, with wives feeling like chattels, too scared to leave in case they find themselves on the breadline.
This whole sorry business reminds me of a girlfriend I had in my early twenties. She was super-bright, funny, talented: she could have done anything she wanted to do with her life and excelled at it. She chose, wildly romantically at the time, to get married straight out of college. Then she had babies – quite a lot of them – and stayed at home, nobly, to look after them.
Time passed. You can dip a toe into the career world for the first time in your twenties and work hard and catch up quickly. It’s a different story in your thirties – no one much wants to be (or hire) a 34-year-old graduate trainee. Fast-forward to your forties and unless you have unusual oomph the idea of working for the first time is intimidating. There’s a part of you that thinks: this isn’t ideal but I’d better stay put because the alternative is terrifying.
The last time I saw said girlfriend she told me about a family summer holiday. Suddenly, she said, she couldn’t stand it any more. She felt trapped, suffocated, like she was wasting her life. She left the children sitting on a beach mat with their father and started walking away down the beach, thinking: this is it; I have to leave.
She walked and walked, and as she walked she realised that she had nowhere to go. She had no money of her own, only that of her husband, who wouldn’t take kindly to being abandoned. She lived in a big, comfortable house, but if she kept on walking she couldn’t even rent a tiny studio flat in a horrible area.
She couldn’t buy food for her children, let alone clothes or treats. She could get a job she was grotesquely overqualified for, of course, such as waitressing or pulling pints or selling clothes. She saw her potential new life and was frightened by it, so she turned around and walked back to the beach mat.
I don’t expect this story is particularly unusual: I think the majority of married women have played out a version of it in their head at some point. The salient point, apart from the awful, obliterating sadness of the thing, is that my friend had never worked to earn money, for the very honourable reason that she was a devoted, hands-on mother.
If she had put her considerable talents to use, she would not be, as 59% of women apparently are, in a situation where leaving an unhappy relationship is simply not financially feasible.
This is incredibly important. If women want to be free it is crucial they earn their own money. Marrying a high-earning man may look like a sinecure on the outside, especially to today’s generation of celebrity-seeking wannabes, but it’s no guarantee of anything: it leaves women in the most precarious and vulnerable position imaginable.
If you have daughters, please drum this into their heads: self-sufficiency may not be a very sexy concept when there are people out there who’ll buy you Marc Jacobs handbags, but it is the key to female happiness. Earning your own money – lots of it, ideally – means you always have a choice.
That may not be good news for the nuclear family, but it’s always good news for women, for their children and for the people who love them – and that’s family enough for me.
india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk
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