Without an exit strategy

A POINT OF VIEW

Traditional wedding or civil partnership, we are still in love with the idea of getting hitched. But when things turn sour, many now regard relationship therapy as alien as the dial-up phone, says Katharine Whitehorn.

This month Relate is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Marriage Guidance council, which was its original name.

I have a particular interest in this, not so much because they ever had to put the pieces of my marriage back together, but because it was my grandfather, Doctor Herbert Gray, who founded it.

Not unaided, of course, but he was the main moving spirit. He was a Presbyterian minister, passionately on the side of peace, he had been appalled by his time as a padre in World War I.

They weren't wild about Kinsey, I think and I doubt if they took much notice of Shere Hite Hear Radio 4's A Point of View

He was distressed too, at the conditions of the poor and had affronted his smart Glasgow parishioners before that war by laying out on a trestle table in front of the kirk the shirts that were made by sweated labour in the city's slums - doing much what the media does nowadays when worrying how shops like Primark keeps its prices down.

He also wrote books - most importantly one in the 1920s called Men Women and God, which aimed to tackle the tortuous and messy problems of sex and love and married life from a Christian viewpoint.

It was reprinted, amazingly, in the 1980s and all told sold a million copies. Because of it, he attracted all sorts of confused or unhappy married people who came to ask his advice and he realised that there was no obvious place for them to go for help.

So he and others, inspired by something similar in the United States had started the council. To begin with, a lot of the advice was of a practical sort like helping them find the right doctor, the right pastor or lawyer. Over the years the sort of help the council gave changed with the times.

"Advice" as such later became suspect - you weren't supposed to tell people what to do and gave way to what one old hand recalled as the stage.

I think it was in the 1960s "when all we did was grunt". In the 1970s there was a lot of confusion about whether they should in effect be therapists.

I remember in the late 1970s, when I happened to be president of one of the branches, having long arguments with one counsellor, who thought her main, indeed only, concern was with the feelings of the person in front of her. But the remit broadened from a time when only the steadily married were allowed to be counsellors to headlining as patrons those well-known divorcees, Princess Diana and Bel Mooney.

Turning the tide

It took them a long time, too, to realise that not all sexual dysfunction is psychological. It's sad to think how much straight physical therapy, like the prevention of premature ejaculation, was simply not suggested.

Marriage is far from a dying institution

They weren't wild about Kinsey, and I doubt if they took much notice of Shere Hite, the woman who told the world loudly where the main seat of female pleasure actually is. But they became increasingly professional, especially in the late 1970s when they started running residential courses at Herbert Gray Hall in Rugby and eventually took in sexual therapy as well.

What gradually eroded over the years was the notion that "Our client is the marriage". They took on all sorts of couples who weren't actually linked by marriage, "that binding holy and legal link between a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a woman who can't sleep with the window open". Indeed by now they do single people as well.

Mind you, quite a few were not married even in the 1930s. When Monica Dickens was working giving out ration books and identity cards in 1939, she was amazed how many apparently married couples actually weren't. She said she felt like going down the quiet suburban streets crying "You can come out, you're none of you married". But marriage then was the only respectable arrangement.

Morality, any sense of "ought" took a back seat too, though a canon did refuse to counsel a man and his mistress, ignoring his wife; he had become a counsellor because, as a chaplain for Strangeways Prison, he had realised almost all the inmates came from broken homes.

Name change

The council changed its name to Relate in 1988, understandably given the enormous numbers of couples of all or any sex who were living together rather than actually tying the knot.

A couple kiss during their civil partnership ceremony

Yet there was still a question mark over the way the evolution of their enormously important and helpful work had gone. Some years back there was a mass general meeting of counsellors from all over the country addressed by CH Halsey, professor of sociology. He gave a long speech, without a script, leaning on the front of the lecturer's table.

What he was saying was that we might have gone too far down the route of caring about the individual, and that it was perhaps time to take more notice of the wellbeing of the "tribe". This provoked a lot of muttering - puzzled and sometimes cross - among the massed counsellors. But he had a point - they now do family therapy.

Relate perforce was operating in a society with far looser ties. It used to be said about the Marriage Guidance Council "Oh, you're the people who try to rejoin together that which people want to put asunder". And while they were saying "Our client is the marriage", I suppose they were mainly doing just that and perhaps it wasn't such a bad thing.

There was a survey a few years ago in the US that asked couples who had split up whether they were happier or less happy. In a few cases parties were less happy, in rather more both were happy, but in the vast majority of cases one was much happier and the other much less happy.

Nowadays there's a widespread view that if people aren't blissfully happy all the time, they're quite right to try something else and along with this goes the number of couples who cohabit rather than get married. After all, they say, marriage - it's only a bit of paper. What difference does it make?

I am not taking the Sam Goldwyn view that "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on", but marriage is not only a bit of paper. It is a commitment, a public vow, a resolve, a closing of the door on other options.

Wishing the heavens

One of the most restful things about marriage is the switching off of that background debate: "Is this going to last? Do I want it to? Will he leave? Do I love her enough?" You're married; you've switched that background buzz off.

But will it last?

Maybe you tough it out instead. I know Relate does as much as anybody and perhaps, as much as can be done to help people in trouble. I wish them enormously well.

But I wish they were operating in a society where it wasn't only priests and mullahs who insistently support marriage, where "till something do us part" seems almost as normal as "in sickness and in health; as long as we both shall live". Chesterton said, "In every undertaking worth doing there comes a moment when only honour and determination will make you continue".

I don't know how good we are at honour and determination, though I suppose I had better say I am absolutely not against divorce when things are really not working. But I perhaps take a different view from some of the young on what makes it work. I think you handle the bad bits better if you don't see exit as an option.

I had a most remarkable endorsement of the view about the difference marriage makes from a friend who suddenly found immense happiness with another woman. They have lived together for 19 years and last November they got married - that's what they called it. "But does it really make any difference?" I asked. "It made an immense difference," she said. "To both of us. We were both stunned by how much difference it made."

In the Middle Ages people would occasionally vow something - not to shave or cut their hair till the tyrant was overcome, to walk to Rome barefoot, to wear a hair shirt till the end of their days - and stick to it.

I am not saying that getting married is wearing - or even ironing - a hair shirt. But I think we do need the power to say "Here I stand; for good and all" and mean it.

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