When detail of that kind emerges, over a drink or two for instance, and possibly at great length, the frontline report makes for grim listening. A married person, after the fourth glass of wine, rarely if ever fesses up that, years on, loving kindness, stimulating conversation and great sex reign under the mortgaged roof. The story will take a different turn altogether and, one hopes, the children, privy to the looming bust-up headline will never, so to speak, have seriously to read on. My younger friends have pre-empted this situation. I’m not sure which requires greater courage: to marry or not to marry, given our needs. Either way, in these more enlightened times, the force of the law will, if necessary, be ready to spring into action if one of the warring parties has changed the locks in a tactical masterstroke and commandeered the assets. So, no wedding to attend, no champagne, no bountiful nosh, no speeches, in fact, possibly no hope. Unless an alternative route to a loving domestic destination has been decided upon. I hope so.

I wonder if there are marriage counsellors who have never fallen in love, never married—rather like priests who have to listen to all manner of things about which they have no personal acquaintance. I myself have lived within the institution of marriage but am no authority. It happened this way—with little fanfare. We made a booking at the registry office in Hobart, Tasmania, and pinned down a witness. Although a weekday, it was quite a busy day for weddings though, luckily, we were able to get a slot near lunchtime on the day we required. This was a day when the witness and the other guest, my father, who lived interstate, could turn up. If this sounds like a mean, though roughly accurate, guest list I should explain: all the other relatives were a hemisphere away, not in Australia—my future wife and I had met in London—and we were new in town. The ceremony was followed by drinks in a pub, we newlyweds the centre of attention, conducted in a similar optimistic spirit towards the future when we raised a glass or two together in the same bar after our divorce. Our relationship was not restricted by legal documents. But I am getting ahead. In the car park, just prior to our entering the registry building, my father took me aside and said, with all of the casualness of someone offering a boiled sweet, ‘Why are you bothering to get married?’ I was unprepared for this question. It was a hammer blow. As it was, I think, sometime later when, perhaps inappropriately—though truthfully—1 mentioned this query of my father’s to my wife, one of the most honest and understanding people I have ever met and who was now pregnant.

The answer was that we were doing it for him and the aforementioned non-libertarian relatives who couldn’t attend and didn’t have the contraceptive pill in their day. It was, under the cheerful circumstances, an obligation, the done thing. We, after all the generations of marriages in our families, didn’t want to go it alone, cause upset, be shunned. All of a sudden, minutes prior to signing the marriage certificate, the sense we had of generational coercion appeared to be radically misplaced. It put me off my stride when going up the steps. But too late to say, ‘Hey look, it appears out of the blue we can take an alternative route’, which is what my friends may be considering now, the institution ever being reinforced by politicians, churchmen and other parties with a necessary interest in social order. Besides, those missing relatives were, in an incorporeal way, present in large numbers, might hold an opposite view and let it be known. There is mercy in very small ceremonies.