When the signal flashed to the organ loft that the bridal party had stepped out of their limousines, the organist struck up the wedding march from Lohengrin. The bride walked solemnly to the altar on her father's arm. When they reached the front pew she asked for the microphone, turned to the congregation, and announced: My fiancé slept with my bridesmaid last night. The wedding is off - and walked out of the church on her own.

After an appalled silence, people's reactions were various. Those who had paid for the clothes and the reception were upset. The groom made his escape as quietly as he could. There were some who felt: How could she do this to us? But the commonest reaction was approving: Brave girl! You could not start a lifelong relationship on such a foundation. Compared with the importance of the family the couple had hoped to start, the loss of money and the emotional upset do not count.

Stability in a fluid world
Readers may remember a priest from the Philippines talking on radio about weddings at which he had assisted. The desperately poor people of his area had neither the means nor the desire to spend money on clothes, cars and other flimflam. In a fearfully insecure life, where the women would probably have to spend much of their time labouring in other countries to support their family at home, the sacrament itself was hugely important.
Marriage was the one stable thing in a fluid world. It cost practically no money, but demanded something more precious, namely the unshakeable commitment of two people to one another for life. And the sacrament was in huge demand. Could we say the same of Ireland?

Traditional households
Last June, after a release of figures from the Central Statistics Office, the papers headlined: Traditional family in decline. In Dublin, less than one in five households consisted of a married couple with children. In the whole country, roughly one third of households held married couples with children, while 11 consisted of unmarried, cohabiting couples (but only one third of these included children). The traditional family is still by far the commonest type of household, but it is declining, whereas cohabiting couples and single mothers are on the increase.

One does not need to be a priest, or even a Christian, to recognize that this is bad news. Anybody who reads the evidence must agree that marriage is a good thing on almost every measure.

Socialist A.H. Halsey concluded from the research that: 'Children of parents who do not follow the traditional norm tend to die earlier, to have more illness, to do less well in school, to exist at a lower level, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.'

If there is growing inequality in Irish children, it is not so much between the richer and poorer, as between those who have two parents and those who have only one. Children living with married parents are socialized for success. They do better in school than children of single parents or broken families; the get better jobs, and go on to create intact families on their own

Economics
Last May The Economist spelled out the advantages of marriage, not from a moral but from an economic viewpoint. Those who marry 'till death do us part' end up, on average, four times richer than those who never marry. Married men tend to be more responsible: they drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder, earning between 10% and 40% more than single men with similar schooling.

Another study looked at women who became pregnant outside marriage; some of them subsequently married, others did not. Those who never married were twice as likely to be raising their child in poverty as those who married before the baby was six months old. Children who grow up in single-parent homes are more than five times as likely to be poor as those who live with two parents. Two parents are likely to be better at rearing children because they can devote more time and energy to it than one can.

Cohabiting, unmarried parents (in Ireland their number has risen by over 43,000 in the last five years) might seem to offer the same setting to children as married parents. Alas, the children of cohabiting couples do worse than the children of married parents on nearly every measure. One reason may be that such relationships are less stable than marriage. When a couple move in together, it is often without explicit commitment - it is easier to drift into such an arrangement than to drift into marriage; and it is easier to drift out of it than out of marriage.

Uncomfortable reading
What does all this statistical stuff mean for you and me, dear readers? It is hard and upsetting and brings no joy to anyone to face research findings that seem to threaten problems for our children or dear ones. But our job is to face the dangers for children, whether or not it is politically correct to do so, or makes people feel guilty.

Cohabiting couples, or single mothers whose children have no resident father, can feel threatened when confronted with the findings of observation and research. No matter what the topic, if one generalises about the effect of certain conditions on children, some people will feel guilty and resentful.

The point is to foresee the dangers. If fatherless boys suffer from the absence of a male model, that need can be partly met in various ways. We see many of our children, nieces and nephews being shy to commit themselves, and experimenting with various forms of family structure. Arguments from religion, tradition or moral principles may not make much impression on them. But the experience of young people in other countries is striking - not so much the statistics, as the reasons behind the statistics (see The Economist for 26 May 2007, p.21).

Why is it that children living with two married parents do so much better than children of single or cohabiting parents, when all other variables are taken into account? It is largely because of commitment, another word for faithful love, which creates the sort of stable home in which we would like every child to grow up.