If we don’t trust each other very much we can hardly be expected to go around marrying each other, can we? In many western countries, marriage rates are

declining broadly in line with the percentage of people who believe that other people can be trusted. With that in mind, fewer people may be getting married because they’ve seen to their cost what the destruction of trust within a marriage does to people. But there is one — to me, obvious and saddening — aspect of this twinned decline in trust and marriage. It is that both are becoming the preserve of those who can afford them.

The novelist Andrew O’Hagan, in his astringent but ultimately mean-spirited recent essay on the English working class, complained that “they take their deracination completely for granted”. That’s not what I see on young men’s faces in towns and cities in the UK, France or the US for instance, who are un/under-employed and can barely provide for themselves, never mind anyone else. What I see is a permanent rage, an angry refusal, because they know life shouldn’t be like this — “this” being whatever it is that has hurt them that day. Refusing to marry unreliable, poor or violent men hasn’t made poor women any richer or less likely to suffer violence. In the United Kingdown, most of the 24% of women raising children alone are as vulnerable, if not as socially pariah-like, as they ever were before marriage rates declined.

Many are alone because the men they know don’t trust themselves enough to be trusted.

It made me think of the full-beamed glower of the man who watched me take some cash out of my pocket to pay for a weekly pass on the bus last week. I blushed and sat down, seeing out of the corner of one eye how he’d managed to command the whole of a double seat by sitting with his legs gynaecogically wide. The ball of his foot rested on the nerve which causes the whole leg to tremble. When he stood to alight, the driver said “There you go” in a kindly way as he opened the door. He didn’t say thank you. He very pointedly refused to. I watched him walk off, a clenched fist in a thin black tracksuit, looking back at the man behind the wheel who reminded of him of his own lack of grace.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, comments that “when human beings act out their individual feelings without reflection and scrutiny, they are likely very soon to become incapable of living with each other”. But to reflect on your feelings requires that you trust them not to frighten you. No one in a bad marriage wants to look, except at the wrongdoing of the other person. So if “a good childhood” requires trust, constancy and, above all, abundant unselfish love, it follows that “a good marriage” needs the same. Chronic financial and social insecurity brings about chronic insecurity in human relationships. A marriage can’t be stable without a context of stability. But it’s still wrong to say that family breakdown causes disadvantage and deprivation. It’s the other way around. —The Guardian