Love and politics have collided in my homeland.   I was back home in England last week, when the British opposition party elected a new leader, Ed Milibrand.  Right now Britain has a coalition party in power, which is always a bit shaky.  I heard a lot about Mr Milibrand on the radio as I drove through the gloomy weather.  (I knew the weather was gloomy because they actually called it gloomy on the weather forecast.)  What I didn’t hear about him was that he is not married to his partner, Justine Thornton, and according to the BBC he shares a home with her.

Ok, you might say.  Lot’s of people cohabit.  And they are planning to get married.  It’s just he’s been a bit busy recently, with all the tumultuous change in the government over there.  But Milibrand is now a real contender for the Prime Minister slot, and no-one seems to mind all that much that he isn’t married.  He himself answers questions saying that people are “pretty relaxed” about it. 

Someone who doesn’t sound particularly relaxed about cohabitation is Mike McManus, founder of Marriage Savers.  “Scripture is clear. “Flee fornication,” Paul warns (I Cor. 7:18).   What is cohabitation but fornication raised to the 100th power? The outcome of sin can never be good. ” he writes, and goes on to argue that it’s a big mistake to live together before marriage. 

I’ve written before about this issue, showing that you can get the statistics to say pretty much anything.  McManus uses them to forcefully assert his case.  But a few months ago I wrote about Scott Stanley who took a deeper look at the numbers, concluding that if you commit to your partner before you live with them, then cohabitation might be a positive thing.

It’s interesting to look at how attitudes to marriage shift across the world.  The case of Ed Milibrand highlights just one example, contrasting with the US presidential race the quality of the candidate’s marriage becomes a major issue of focus.  Just getting on a plane, even in the USA, exposes you to dramatic differences in attitudes to same-sex marriage too. 

Is marriage just about culture,  where you live, and which religious group you join?  Or are there some universal values that transcend culture?

One answer is that it all depends on which kind of marriage you want.  There are many – from the loose affiliations of a tribal harem, to the model prevalent until relatively recently, in which the woman effectively belonged to the man, and existing to serve him and provide his heirs.

Underneath all of the formality of a marriage, its the relationship that really matters.  In Imago we believe that the move away from marriage that we see in society is simply a rejection of some aspects of traditional marriage models, such as economic dependence.   Yet people are still choosing to live with their partners, and many of them go on to choose some sort of commitment.  What they have in common, is a desire to live in connection with one another.