Triumph of hope
The stats don’t lie when it comes to the success of marriage
By Catherine Ford
Illustration By Lori Langille
A good Marriage is great for the health of the couple involved, the happiness of any subsequent children, the wealth of a community and the well-being of the country. Quite an accomplishment for an institution many people believe is passé.
But the experts, from marriage counsellors to economists, are unfazed by the divorce rate. That’s because they know something most of us don’t think about: statistics.
In Canada, around 84 per cent of families are headed by a married couple, reports Statistics Canada. While one-third of Canadian marriages end in divorce, three-quarters of men remarry and slightly fewer women choose to try again. Indeed, Canadians love marriage.
In a population of just over 33 million, 15 million of us are married, seperated or are in a common-law relationship while a scant1.7 million are divorced. In 2006, almost 150,000 Canadians chose to walk down the aisle. (Or scuba dive, or go to Vulcan, Alberta, for a Star Trek wedding, or watch a sunset on a tropical beach.) How ever they celebrated the occasion, the result was an addition to the two-by-two way of the world.
Why marriage is so good for the body politic, like vitamin D and compound interest, is because predictability is better than chaos. Stability trumps all else and the foundation of our society is only momentarily rocked by divorce. Remarriage reforms the circle and town planners and retailers, churches and schools, and our social institutions settle back into the comfort of what is known and what is expected.
So favoured a state is marriage that in 2005 the federal government legalized same-sex marriages, albeit not without a lot of foot-dragging. Barely a ripple in the fabric of the community was noted. Indeed, the need for the stability of marriage for children was noted by Stats Can when the agency reported same-sex couples with children were more likely to be married. A law professor, as part of a research project, said same-sex couples “felt it sent an important message to their children that they were committed to each other.”
No, one does not need to marry. There are thousands of common-law couples that feel no need to marry to affirm their bond with one another. But most of us want to make that commitment to a loved one.
And here we all thought marriage was about love and romance leading to that picture-perfect wedding day and the Cinderella ending. Still, not all of us are blinded by the plastic bride and groom on top of the wedding cake. The late curmudgeon H.L. Mencken wrote: “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” Long before Mencken’s time, Samuel Johnson observed:
“A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”
Let me add another observation for those of us who are happily wed, whether for the first or whatever time: A happy marriage is the triumph of hope and hard work over selfishness, narcissism and loneliness.
