Spring is here, and every marquee in the Cotswolds has been hired out for a wedding. Marriage is back in fashion. There is always a spring rush, but business is booming. My gym is plastered with notices urging me to visit the Juliet and Desdemona bridal collection. I know I live near Stratford-upon-Avon, and the bard can sell anything in Britain, from tea towels to Quill Fries (they come in a bag with a picture of Anne Hathaway cooking them in her cottage), but suppose the bride made the mistake of reading the plays? Maybe you get a free phial of poison with every wedding dress. Perhaps today's Desdemona will strangle Othello before he has a chance to be eaten up with jealousy.
Maybe I'm misreading the whole thing and Juliet and Desdemona are marrying each other in California, and Romeo and Othello are opening a bar. But if Britain really is becoming more matrimonial, we have broken off our love affair with everything American, where the annual number of weddings per 1,000 eligible women has fallen by a third since the 1970s.
During the 1990s, the number of unmarried-partner households in America increased by over 70%. Is this just the land of the free getting freer? Might it be that women don't want to marry in the way they once did - perhaps because economic independence means they don't need to marry?
It has been said that marriage survives because it is a very efficient way for people to organise their common lives together - children, money, property, all get taken care of without too much thought. Add in emotional security and social approval, and marriage looks good - at least on paper.
In the US, the problems for marriage seem to be less about feminism or pay parity, and more about the paper benefits of marriage becoming less important. The stigma attached to unmarried relationships is gone, and because conservative groups don't want gay people to marry, a whole raft of legal concessions has been put in place to keep gay partnerships afloat - the unintended effect being that unmarried heterosexuals benefit too.
If you can get everything that marriage offers without marrying - why marry? The paradox is that countries that have genuinely equal partnership laws, such as Denmark and Sweden, have not experienced a sharp decline in marriage. America's desperate attempt not to rock the boat is in peril of sinking the ship. Marriage has become unsexy, and dangerously undemocratic. If society as a whole benefits from marriage, as its supporters claim, marriage has to be an option for every member of society, regardless of sexual orientation.
Rightwingers hate this kind of talk, but then rightwingers have been against mixed marriages, marriages to non-virgins, cross-class marriages, non-religious ceremonies, no-fault divorce and, of course, second marriages. Rightwingers have been proved wrong every time - society has not collapsed, society continues to evolve. Even Country Life, not known as the vanguard magazine for alternative lifestyles, recently ran an editorial rejoicing in Britain's rising marriage rate, then admitted these statistics related to second marriages.
Marriage isn't for life any more - life is too long. Marriage is for love. Love gladly accepts responsibility. Love wants commitment. Marriage should be celebrated as the optimistic and glorious thing that it is. We can't call it a failure if it doesn't last for ever.
The only failure is cynicism. The US government has just set aside $300m to try and persuade young men to marry their girlfriends instead of living with them. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is slashing or freezing welfare benefits to single mothers. This depressing right-wing route to a 1950s style society, diluted with a bit of added tolerance, assumes that there really was something called "the good ol' days" and that if we could only find our way back to Eden, we could all live happily ever after and sin no more.
Yet the fact that many young people do not choose marriage, is surely because their parents' marriages were so bloody awful. Why would you willingly put yourself in a situation shaped by misery?
Making marriage attractive again will cost more than tax breaks and PR. Instead of expecting us to fit ourselves into a frankly dodgy little number - and that's just the Desdemona wedding dress - let's make marriage the true centre of society and open it to everyone. Until then, it's never going to work.
