Understanding the Stability of Marriage in Contemporary Britain

New ONS figures show that 83.7 per cent of couples who married in 2015 had not divorced by their tenth anniversary. Yet those marriages exist within a country undergoing a profound failure of transmission: fertility has fallen to 1.39 children per woman, almost one third of recorded conceptions end in abortion, deaths are projected to exceed births, Christianity has fallen below half the population of England and Wales, and under the latest ONS principal projection net migration supplies all UK population growth over the next quarter-century. At the same time, younger religious populations possess demographic momentum which an ageing Christian population does not. Immigration did not cause Britain’s retreat from Christianity, marriage or family life. The deeper question is what happens when increasing demographic dependence upon migration coincides with the erosion of the common faith, culture and institutions which once helped different peoples coalesce into one society.

For years we have been told that marriage is failing. The institution is supposedly obsolete, younger generations no longer believe in it, divorce is inevitable, cohabitation amounts to much the same thing, and somewhere around half of everybody who marries will eventually discover that the whole enterprise was a mistake. There is only one difficulty with that story: the figures increasingly refuse to cooperate.

The Office for National Statistics has now published its divorce figures for England and Wales for 2024 and 2025. Of couples who married in 2015, an estimated 16.3 per cent had divorced before reaching their tenth wedding anniversary. Put the figure the other way round and 83.7 per cent had not divorced within their first ten years of marriage.¹ That 83.7 per cent is not an official ONS “marriage success rate”. The ONS measures legal divorce, not marital happiness, and some couples who remain legally married may nevertheless be separated. But that qualification should not obscure what has happened. Among couples marrying in 1995, 24.7 per cent had divorced by their tenth anniversary; among the 2005 cohort it was 20.7 per cent; among those marrying in 2015 it was only 16.3 per cent. The ONS itself says that the previous movement towards more marriages ending, and ending earlier, appears to be reversing.¹

The annual figures tell much the same story. Among opposite-sex married people the divorce rate stood at 8.4 per 1,000 married people in 2025, compared with 14.2 at the 1993 peak, while the median duration of an opposite-sex marriage ending in divorce reached 13 years, the longest recorded since that series began in 1963.¹ Marriage has certainly not become invulnerable: there were still 105,002 divorces in England and Wales in 2025, and remaining legally married tells us nothing by itself about the spiritual or emotional health of a household. What the figures do tell us is that the ubiquitous warning that “half of marriages end in divorce” is a very poor description of contemporary marriage cohorts. The institution routinely presented to younger generations as a fifty-fifty gamble is proving substantially more durable than the mythology surrounding it.

That matters because Britain’s difficulty is no longer simply one of divorce. It is becoming a wider failure of transmission. A civilisation has to transmit human life from one generation to another, family bonds strong enough to form those children, a moral vocabulary through which they understand love, duty and sacrifice, and an intelligible account of the history, culture and institutions into which they have been born. For much of British history Christianity supplied a substantial part of that common grammar. Several of those mechanisms of transmission are now weakening together.

The total fertility rate in England and Wales fell to 1.39 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.41 the previous year. There were 585,396 live births, 1.6 per cent fewer than in 2024, and the standardised mean age of mothers was 31.1 years compared with 26.4 in 1975. Meanwhile 40.2 per cent of live births had at least one parent born outside the United Kingdom.² That last figure says nothing adverse about those children or their parents. A child is not made less worthy, less loved or less capable of becoming thoroughly British because his mother or father was born in Lagos, Manila, Warsaw or Mumbai. It does, however, illustrate how substantially the demographic sources of Britain’s next generation are changing while fertility across the population remains far below replacement level.

Abortion belongs to the same demographic picture. Of the 871,050 recorded conceptions in England and Wales in 2023, 279,970 ended in abortion: 32.1 per cent, the highest proportion on record. The number of conceptions ending in abortion had increased by 35.2 per cent since 2019, while conceptions resulting in maternities remained on the longer downward trajectory which began in 2012.³ Marriage again reveals a striking difference. In 2022, 11.1 per cent of conceptions within marriage or civil partnership ended in abortion, compared with 36 per cent outside marriage or civil partnership.⁴ Those figures do not establish that marriage itself causes the difference; married and unmarried women differ in age, circumstances, intentions and other characteristics. They do establish that conception occurs within markedly different social contexts.

Marriage creates obligations before pregnancy occurs. Father and mother have already bound their futures together publicly. A child is ordinarily conceived into a household whose members have accepted responsibilities towards one another which are not supposed to depend upon the continuation of present feelings. Where relationships remain provisional for longer, pregnancy can more readily arrive as another matter to be fitted around two separate plans for life. The relationship between marriage, fertility and abortion should therefore be understood culturally rather than mechanically: permanence changes the environment in which new life is received.

Postponement matters for the same reason. There may be excellent reasons for delaying marriage or parenthood, but biology does not suspend itself while careers, housing and finances are perfected. Couples who sincerely intend one day to have three or four children may discover that the years available to them have contracted before they consciously decided to have a smaller family. A culture which teaches young adults to regard permanent commitment chiefly as a risk therefore influences more than wedding statistics; it can also influence the number of children who are ultimately born.

The latest ONS population projections show the demographic implications of present assumptions. Between mid-2024 and mid-2034, the United Kingdom is projected to experience around 450,000 more deaths than births, while net international migration adds around 2.2 million people. Across the twenty-five years to mid-2049, deaths are projected to exceed births by 2.5 million, net migration totals 5.6 million, and the population rises by 3.1 million. Under this principal projection, net migration is the only source of UK population growth over the twenty-five-year period.⁵ These are projections rather than predictions, and the ONS expressly warns that future fertility, mortality and migration can differ from its assumptions. Their significance lies in what present demographic behaviour implies if broadly continued.

This helps explain why migration has become so important to economic forecasting. The Office for Budget Responsibility describes net migration as a key driver of population growth and labour supply and estimates that it accounts for around two thirds of adult-population growth in its March 2026 medium-term forecast.⁶ The attraction to governments and employers is straightforward. A child born in Britain today requires perhaps two decades of care, education and family expenditure before entering the labour market as an adult; a trained twenty-eight-year-old arriving from overseas may fill a vacancy immediately. Migration can therefore address labour shortages on a political and economic timescale which demographic renewal cannot.

It is important, however, not to turn that observation into the opposite myth that migrants as a whole are predominantly workless. The evidence does not support it. In 2025, 83 per cent of working-age foreign-born men were employed, compared with 77 per cent of UK-born men, while the respective rates among women were 72 and 73 per cent.⁷ The averages conceal considerable differences by sex, region of origin and reason for migration, but the majority of working-age migrants plainly do participate in the labour market.

That distinction is precisely why “migration” cannot sensibly be treated as one economic category. A doctor recruited directly into an NHS vacancy, an engineer entering on a skilled-worker visa, an international student, a dependant, an asylum seeker and a vulnerable resettled refugee are not interchangeable entries in a labour-market spreadsheet. The economic justification for admitting one cannot automatically be transferred to all the others.

Most people with temporary immigration permission are subject to no recourse to public funds, which generally excludes them from specified mainstream welfare benefits such as Universal Credit and from ordinary access to social housing.⁸ That is an important restriction and prevents the claim that temporary migrants can simply arrive and immediately claim the full conventional welfare system. Yet NRPF is also frequently misunderstood in the opposite direction. “No recourse to public funds” is an immigration-law category; it does not mean that the person concerned necessarily imposes no cost upon the taxpayer.

The asylum system demonstrates the distinction particularly clearly. Asylum seekers generally cannot claim Universal Credit and are ordinarily prohibited from working while their claims are being determined, yet destitute applicants are supported through a separate Home Office system providing accommodation and subsistence. In 2024–25 the Home Office spent approximately £4.0 billion on asylum support, including £2.1 billion on hotels, then averaging £5.77 million a day.⁹ The National Audit Office calculated that combined Home Office and Ministry of Justice expenditure on the asylum system in 2024–25 was around £4.9 billion and noted that its calculation still did not fully capture costs falling elsewhere, particularly upon local authorities.¹⁰

Expenditure has fallen as the asylum backlog and hotel use have reduced, but the underlying public commitment remains substantial. At the end of June 2026, 93,293 people were receiving asylum support, 12 per cent fewer than a year earlier and 25 per cent below the September 2023 peak. Of those supported, 16,021 remained in hotels while most of the remainder were in other forms of accommodation or receiving subsistence-only assistance.¹¹ The reduction matters, but so does the broader point: mainstream-benefit eligibility is a poor proxy for total public cost.

Refugee employment outcomes make the route-by-route distinction still more important. Home Office administrative analysis found that 26 per cent of working-age asylum refugees were employed in the calendar year in which refugee status was granted. From two years after recognition onwards, employment remained broadly between 48 and 51 per cent, substantially below the wider UK working-age employment rate. Historical cohorts entering through vulnerability-based resettlement schemes recorded still lower employment, though those schemes deliberately selected people because of their need and vulnerability.¹² These figures cannot be translated into unwillingness to work: health, trauma, language, caring responsibilities, recognition of overseas qualifications and immigration rules all affect labour-market entry. They do show that humanitarian migration cannot simply be described as another mechanism for filling labour shortages.

The Universal Credit figures point in the same direction while requiring another qualification. Among people actually receiving Universal Credit in April 2026, 29.9 per cent of those recorded with refugee status were in employment, the lowest employment proportion among the immigration-status categories published by the Department for Work and Pensions.¹³ That is not the employment rate of all refugees; it measures refugees already within the Universal Credit caseload, and Universal Credit itself is also paid to working households on low incomes. It nevertheless reinforces the need to distinguish between immigration routes when discussing fiscal effects.

Asylum seekers present an additional anomaly because most are normally prohibited from working while their claims are outstanding. Permission to work may ordinarily be considered only after a claim has remained unresolved for at least twelve months through no fault of the applicant, and permission remains restricted.¹⁴ The system therefore creates a period in which people may be unable to support themselves through ordinary employment and are instead maintained through asylum support. If they are subsequently recognised as refugees, their restriction on employment ends and they can, subject to the ordinary eligibility rules, enter the mainstream benefits system.

This does not justify describing asylum seekers or refugees collectively as people who choose welfare over work. It does require something more sophisticated than the assertion that every increase in migration represents an equivalent increase in productive labour. Every additional resident also requires housing and infrastructure; children require education; illness requires healthcare; low-paid workers may qualify for in-work benefits; and economically inactive residents make a different fiscal contribution from high earners. The economically relevant question is therefore route-specific and concerns net fiscal contribution over time, not merely whether a person is of conventional working age or technically excluded from Universal Credit on the day of arrival.

The Government’s 2025 immigration White Paper itself acknowledged a wider structural problem, arguing that the preceding system had allowed employers to become too dependent upon recruitment from abroad while domestic training, workforce development and productivity lagged.¹⁵ That is the present Government’s political interpretation of its predecessor’s record rather than a neutral historical verdict, but the underlying expansion of overseas recruitment after 2020 is not disputed. The broader demographic sequence requires no theory of hidden intent: fertility fell, the population aged, labour shortages became more acute, and migration supplied adults capable of entering the workforce far sooner than a revival of family formation could.

Irregular migration is a separate matter again. British governments of different parties have repeatedly adopted policies intended to deter illegal entry, disrupt smuggling networks and remove people without a lawful right to remain. Those efforts have not amounted to an official policy of encouraging clandestine immigration, but they have also not achieved sustained control. In the year ending June 2026 there were 38,086 detected arrivals through illegal routes, including 33,374 by small boat. Small-boat arrivals were 23 per cent lower than a year earlier but remained broadly in line with the levels recorded in the years ending June 2022 and June 2024.¹⁶ Detection figures do not capture all undetected illegal entry, a limitation the Home Office itself emphasises.

Asylum and illegal entry are also not synonymous. In the year ending June 2026, 40 per cent of asylum claimants had arrived by small boat and a further 12 per cent through other illegal routes, while 41 per cent had previously entered with a visa or other form of lawful permission before claiming asylum.¹⁷ Humanitarian migration is different again. The Government recorded 124,930 grants of leave through designated safe and legal humanitarian routes in the year ending June 2026, but 69 per cent of these were extensions for people already in Britain rather than new overseas arrivals.¹⁸ Public debate becomes unnecessarily confused when labour migration, asylum, irregular entry and humanitarian schemes are collapsed into a single undifferentiated number.

There nevertheless remains a clear democratic tension over scale. Ipsos found in April 2025 that 67 per cent of Britons believed total immigration was too high, while 68 per cent said the same about numbers entering to seek asylum or refugee status. Concern varied significantly by route: 41 per cent thought work migration too high, considerably fewer than for asylum or family migration.¹⁹ The figures do not prescribe what policy ought to be, but they show that governments have had to reconcile strong public concern over overall numbers with employers, institutions and fiscal forecasts that can generate incentives for continued inward migration.

The argument becomes distorted, however, if immigration is treated as the beginning of Britain’s demographic or cultural problem. It was not. Britain’s deeper transformation began within Britain itself. In 2001, 71.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales identified as Christian. By 2011 it was 59.3 per cent; by 2021 it was 46.2 per cent, the first census in which fewer than half identified as Christian. Over the same period, the proportion declaring no religion rose from 14.8 per cent to 37.2 per cent. Muslim identification increased from 4.9 per cent in 2011 to 6.5 per cent in 2021, while Hindu identification also increased.²⁰ The principal religious movement has therefore not been from Christianity to Islam but from Christianity towards no religion. Immigration cannot credibly be made the principal explanation for British de-Christianisation.

The age structure makes the religious transformation more consequential. In 2021 people identifying as Christian had a median age of 51, compared with 40 for the population overall. Muslims were the youngest of the major tick-box religious groups, with a median age of 27, while those reporting no religion had a median age of 32. Of the 3.9 million people identifying as Muslim, 84.5 per cent were under fifty, compared with 62 per cent of the overall population.²¹ Whatever future fertility does, those age structures alone create very different demographic momentum.

There is historical evidence that fertility has also differed substantially. Pew Research Center’s European demographic modelling estimated UK Muslim fertility during 2015–20 at approximately 2.9 children per woman, compared with 1.8 among non-Muslims.²² This is now an old estimate and should not be presented as the current British Muslim fertility rate; British birth registration does not provide a contemporary annual fertility series by religion. Pew itself expected the differential to narrow substantially as later generations converged towards wider national patterns. The current and firmer demographic evidence is therefore the age profile: a religious community with a median age of twenty-seven has far more members entering family-forming ages than one with a median age of fifty-one.

The same evidential restraint is necessary over abortion. British abortion statistics do not record a reliable national abortion rate by religion, so no numerical comparison between Muslim and Christian or non-religious abortion incidence can honestly be made from administrative data. Religious doctrine and survey evidence indicate different moral attitudes towards abortion, but attitudes should not be presented as though they were measured incidence. What can be said securely is that differential age structure, family formation, fertility and retention of religious identity can alter the religious composition of a population through natural increase as well as migration.

Nor should contemporary migration be described simply as non-Christian migration. It plainly is not. Christian immigrants from Nigeria, Ghana, the Philippines, Poland, Romania and elsewhere have strengthened British congregations, sometimes dramatically. Census analysis found religious affiliation above 93 per cent among residents born not only in Bangladesh, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan but also Ghana and Nigeria.²³ The more useful distinction is therefore not “Christian native versus non-Christian immigrant”. It is between a historically Christian society experiencing rapid secularisation and migrant populations among whom religious adherence, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or otherwise, can remain substantially stronger.

The proper Christian response to this demographic contrast is not resentment towards communities which continue to marry, have children or transmit their religion effectively. It is to ask why Christian Britain has become so ineffective at transmitting its own. Islam did not cause British Christians to postpone marriage, embrace small-family norms, cease handing on the faith or accommodate a culture in which almost one recorded conception in three ends in abortion. Much of Britain’s Christian demographic decline has been generated internally. A civilisation which does not transmit its own faith and life should not be surprised when communities which do so more effectively acquire greater demographic weight.

This matters because the demographic changes coincide with a wider reduction in common cultural reference points. In 2001, 87.5 per cent of the population identified within what was then called the White British category; in 2021, 74.4 per cent identified as White English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British. London stood at 36.8 per cent.²⁴ The ONS properly notes that changes in ethnic self-identification, ageing, fertility, mortality and migration all contribute to these figures. They should not be treated as a simple measurement of immigration.

Nor do they demonstrate the disappearance of British identity. In 2021, 90.3 per cent of residents of England and Wales still identified with at least one UK national identity, only modestly below 92 per cent in 2011.²⁵ Millions of Britons of African, Asian, Caribbean and European ancestry plainly understand themselves as British. A multi-ethnic society and a cohesive national society are therefore not mutually exclusive.

The harder question is what content national belonging retains when the religious and cultural framework historically surrounding it becomes thinner. The Casey Review warned in 2016 of social isolation, segregation and communities living increasingly separate lives in some places and called for stronger English-language acquisition and more deliberate integration.²⁶ At the same time, research reviewed by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory cautions strongly against the simplistic proposition that ethnic diversity itself destroys social cohesion: British and European evidence is mixed, with deprivation, inequality and local conditions explaining much of what is sometimes attributed solely to diversity.²⁷ Both conclusions matter.

Integration therefore cannot mean ethnic sameness, but neither can it mean merely inhabiting the same administrative territory. People bring languages, religions, memories, customs, understandings of marriage and family, and assumptions about the relationship between faith, community and public life. A successful common society requires enough shared language, institutions, loyalties and expectations for people formed by different histories to participate in the same political and civic future.

For much of modern British history, Christianity supplied an important part of that common vocabulary even when personal religious observance was weak. Christian assumptions concerning marriage, duty, charity, forgiveness, sacrifice, neighbourliness and human dignity remained broadly intelligible beyond the church door. This is why the secularisation of Christian institutions themselves matters as well as declining census affiliation. If Churches increasingly express Christian teaching through categories borrowed from the surrounding secular culture, their ability to provide a distinctive moral framework inevitably changes.

Secularisation has also proved uneven. Declining historic Christianity has not produced a uniformly non-religious society. Britain increasingly combines an older and shrinking Christian-identifying population, a large and younger population professing no religion, and minority religious communities among whom communal and doctrinal identities may remain stronger. That does not determine political behaviour, which varies enormously within every religious group, but it does change the environment in which politics takes place.

Recent elections have supplied evidence of one possible development: more explicit organisation around religious-demographic constituencies. In the 2024 general election, several pro-Palestinian independents won seats in contests where Gaza was prominent, and Reuters found that Labour’s vote share fell by an average of around ten percentage points in constituencies where Muslims formed more than ten per cent of the population.²⁸ Gaza was not exclusively a Muslim issue, pro-Palestinian candidates also received non-Muslim votes, and Muslim voters cannot be reduced to a single issue. Those qualifications are essential.

At the same time, The Muslim Vote explicitly set out to mobilise Muslim voters, identify constituencies in which their votes could have particular impact and recommend candidates according to a range of policy priorities including foreign policy, the NHS and education.²⁹ There is nothing inherently improper about citizens organising electorally around shared interests; religious organisations, trade unions, businesses and campaign groups have always sought political influence. What is politically significant is the increasingly explicit presentation of a religiously defined electorate as a constituency capable of rewarding or penalising candidates.

The 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election intensified debate about this development. Reporting described Green campaigning directed specifically towards Muslim voters, including Urdu-language material and appeals centred heavily on Gaza, while opponents accused the party of sectarian tactics. The Greens rejected that characterisation.³⁰ Whether “sectarian” is the correct description is therefore contested and should not be presented as an established fact. What is established is that parties have become increasingly conscious of the electoral significance of geographically concentrated religious communities and have adapted campaigning accordingly.

The distinction matters. A Muslim voting for a Muslim candidate is no more intrinsically sectarian than a Catholic voting for a Catholic, and concern about Gaza is a legitimate foreign-policy consideration. A sectarian political logic would arise only if political competition became increasingly structured around permanent communal blocs, with parties bargaining separately for religious or ethnic constituencies and representatives understood primarily as brokers for sectional interests rather than representatives of the whole constituency. The first-past-the-post system can increase the influence of concentrated populations in particular seats, but demographic identity alone does not determine voting behaviour.

The growing domestic electoral significance of Gaza nevertheless demonstrates how transnational causes can interact with communal identity. In September 2026, the incoming director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign argued that Palestine had become a British electoral issue to an unprecedented degree.³¹ That is her assessment rather than a neutral statistical finding, but recent elections provide evidence for the broader proposition that foreign-policy questions can become powerful organising issues in particular communities.

The same mechanism need not be confined to Muslims. Hindu, Jewish, Christian, secular-progressive, ethnic-nationalist and other constituencies can all organise around shared interests. The wider risk is reciprocal communalisation: once political actors discover that explicitly targeted mobilisation succeeds, other groups gain incentives to organise in similar fashion. Whether such mobilisation becomes socially fragmenting depends upon the strength of common citizenship, local integration and the extent to which political institutions continue to speak credibly about a common good applying across communal boundaries.

This is why multi-ethnicity and multicultural fragmentation should not be treated as synonyms. A multi-ethnic Britain can possess a strong common culture, and the census evidence on national identity demonstrates considerable common identification already. A more difficult situation arises where communities increasingly inhabit separate moral worlds while government must adjudicate disputes over marriage, sex, schooling, parental authority, abortion, assisted suicide, religious freedom and freedom of expression. Law cannot remain neutral on such questions indefinitely because law necessarily embodies judgements.

The family returns at this point to the centre of the argument. Marriage is itself an institution of transmission. Husband and wife promise that their common life will not be renegotiated every time preference changes. Children discover that they belong to relationships which preceded their own choices. Family life teaches that freedom and duty are not opposites, that love generates obligations, that inheritance creates responsibilities, and that human beings belong to communities extending backwards towards those who came before and forwards towards people not yet born.

Britain’s demographic, religious and cultural difficulties can therefore be read as different manifestations of a common challenge. Life is being transmitted in smaller numbers. Marriage and family formation occur later and less universally. Christianity is being transmitted less successfully from one generation to the next. The national culture itself is having to decide what, beyond citizenship and law, it wishes to hand on. Migration does not create that problem, although at sufficient scale it interacts with it.

There is no need for theories of secret population replacement to recognise the demographic arithmetic. Where deaths exceed births and net migration supplies all projected population growth, immigration is numerically compensating for negative natural change. That does not establish an intention by government to replace one ethnic or religious population with another. It means simply that a population producing too few children becomes increasingly reliant upon adults born elsewhere if it wishes simultaneously to maintain population growth and labour supply.

Natural increase then operates alongside migration. An older religious population with low fertility and weak intergenerational retention will tend to contract; a younger population with stronger retention and higher fertility can grow without additional immigration. Population proportions are therefore not frozen at the border. They change through births, deaths, marriages, conversion, secularisation, emigration and immigration over successive generations.

From a Catholic perspective, the searching question is consequently not why Muslims or other religious communities continue to take family and faith seriously, but why Christians have become less successful at doing so themselves. Christianity once gave Britain something more substantial than ceremonial survivals. It taught that marriage was permanent, children a blessing, human life sacred, duty honourable, sacrifice meaningful, neighbourliness obligatory and political power subject to a moral law it did not create. Those convictions were capable of crossing ancestry precisely because their claims were universal rather than ethnic.

Christian immigration can strengthen this inheritance, and in many places already does. It cannot by itself restore a Christian culture if historically Christian institutions cease confidently to transmit Christian belief. Nor can administrative language about “British values” entirely perform the work once done by a thick civilisational inheritance. Democracy, liberty, tolerance and the rule of law require continuing agreement about human dignity, conscience, responsibility and the limits of power if they are to retain common meaning.

The latest marriage figures therefore deserve more than a cheerful statistical headline. 83.7 per cent of couples who married in 2015 had not divorced ten years later. Marriage is not as fragile as several generations have often been encouraged to suppose. Among recent marriage cohorts, early divorce has actually fallen.

That offers an important counterpoint to the wider demographic picture. Permanence has not become impossible, and demographic decline is not an immutable law of nature. Yet neither immigration policy nor economic management can by themselves answer the question raised by the figures. A society ultimately depends upon its ability to form families, receive children, transmit beliefs and institutions, and give the next generation sufficient reason to regard what it inherits as worth continuing.

A civilisation cannot transmit what it no longer believes. If families cease to form in sufficient numbers, economic growth cannot manufacture a succeeding generation. If Christianity ceases to supply a common moral grammar, administrative appeals to cohesion cannot simply recreate it. If a nation becomes uncertain about the story into which it wishes its own children to be formed, integration becomes a more demanding task for everybody, native-born and newcomer alike.

The question facing Britain is therefore deeper than the annual argument over migration numbers. It concerns whether Britain retains a faith, a family culture and a common inheritance sufficiently alive to be handed on: first to its own children, and then confidently shared with those who come to make their home among them. The encouraging part of the latest figures is that marriage, despite everything said about it, still supplies evidence that permanence remains possible.