The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams has said that many marriages are threatened from the start by the pressure heaped upon the couple to have a “perfect” wedding.
Speaking at a debate entitled Marriage: Love or Law, he said that the function of law is to protect rather than promote marriage and decried the “marketisation of the marriage experience, crystalised in the perfect wedding day....after which nothing is ever quite so good again”.
He said that couples today are faced with an “offensive” by advertisers and others pressurising them into having a “showy and expensive” day with the declaration of commitment, the original point of the wedding, being sidelined. The Lord, who is now master at Magdalene College, Cambridge, also condemned the growing use of pre-nups which he said contributed to the erosion of trust and said there was a reluctance generally to think about long-term growth as opposed to “rapid gratification”.
His comments closely mirror those of work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith who took a swipe at “fairytale weddings”. The debate heard that the divorce rate has dropped in recent years and that 58% of all marriages ended only with the death of a spouse.
