Who said marriage is dead?

After 28 years, Stuart Jeffries and his partner decided to tie the knot. It was to be a purely pragmatic exercise – no fuss, no guests, no trimmings. But somehow emotion crept in … Below, Pete May explains why he finally got married after 12 years.

There was no stag do in Prague, no ladies’ karaoke night, no wedding list, no inter-family brawl over the buffet, no best man’s speech, no guests or reception, no God or gods, no bended knee, no honeymoon (so far), and no five-figure debt – but somehow, this year, I managed to get married.

Yes, after living together for 28 years, Kay and I tied the knot.

I know what you’re thinking. That sounds just the recipe for a lovely, memorable, moving day. Well, actually it was all those things because, despite our careful planning, we got caught out. Both of us, and our daughter, Juliet, got blindsided by emotion.

But why were we getting married at all? Everything had been great for 28 years and, these days, no one needs to bother with all that fuss.

“In most European countries, the wedding ceremony has become simply useless,” writes the French sociologist Pascal Bruckner in his new book, Has Marriage for Love Failed? “There is no longer any need to marry to live together or to have children.”

See? Marriage is pointless.

Well, Bruckner’s second sentence is true: Kay and I have lived together for nearly three decades, and seven years ago had Juliet without God or the state conferring their, frankly unsought, blessing.

But his first sentence is not true – at least not true of Britain.

Why were we getting married? Because of intimations of mortality: we are getting older and thinking more about what happens financially if one of us dies, and about how to ensure that our money goes to our daughter when we aren’t around any more. And in thinking about all that, we came to the conclusion that getting married would better help our finances now and our daughter’s in the future.

But despite all these advantages, would getting married make us happier? The Daily Mail suggested so. Its recent headline said: “Marriage is the secret to happiness: Tying the knot makes us more content than money, children or having a degree.” The newspaper quoted an Office for National Statistics report: “Holding all else equal and comparing people according to their relationship status shows that married people and those in civil partnerships rate their ‘life satisfaction’, the sense that their activities are ‘worthwhile’, and ‘happiness yesterday’, significantly higher than cohabiting couples, single, divorced and widowed people.”

Is that true? Could Kay and I expect marriage to bring not just financial breaks, but an infusion of happiness? It seemed implausible.

What was lacking from this statisticians’ eulogy to the institution of marriage was an explanation of why one might be happier married than living together. Perhaps, and this is just a thought, married people are more likely to be dishonest about their feelings than cohabitees – in part, because they have spent so much on getting married that they daren’t put the kibosh on their investment.

Maybe, then, we were making a terrible mistake. Hadn’t Kay and I lived together happily for all this time without taking marriage vows?

Hadn’t our relationship endured long after many marriages had failed? True, we had never shelled out for catering, a marquee and a clergyman to make our commitment to each other gaudily public, but we loved and honoured each other as any married couple. And we had stuck it out together for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, in riches and in voluntary redundancy, without the prod of a marital contract.

But if we did marry, we thought, one benefit was that we could ditch the term “partner” – which always made us sound as if we were in business together or gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being in business together – or gay. It’s just that we aren’t.

Now, though, I can call Kay my wife, which defuses misconstrual. I know. Big whoop. And Kay can call me her husband, which, even if it does – serious face – legitimise patriarchy, makes things easier when she is trying to explain her domestic arrangements to call-centre workers.

In the end, we married because we wanted to secure all of our financial futures as much as possible. We entered into our married state sceptically, pragmatically and with no sense that we’d take pleasure in our big day.

But it didn’t quite work out as we planned.

One Friday morning, Kay put on a beautiful dress, I put on the suit I’d last worn for my dad’s funeral, Juliet came out of her bedroom in a lovely frock we had bought for the occasion, and we got into a minicab to go to the register office in the town hall. We stopped to pick up a posy from the florist for Juliet. Already we were entangled in traditional wedding-day moves. Suits. Posies. Taxis. If this really was the purely bureaucratic exchange we had intended, we would have gone on the bus in jeans. We clearly were not as non-conformist as we had hoped.

As the three of us sat in the lobby awaiting our noon appointment, I felt we cut an emotionally vulnerable and eccentric trio.