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eaks to married and civil partner couples signalling his government’s support for
providing couples with incentives to get married (Kirkup, 2012).
Anthropology has uncovered a bewildering variety of marriage types in different
locations and historical eras, including polygamous and polyandrous marriages
(Chambers 2012, p. 16). Stephanie Coontz’s (2004) survey of the evolution of
marriage practices over a five thousand year period provides a challenge to takenfor-granted
understandings of marriage as being set in stone. For example, medieval
understandings of marriage as a private contract, geared towards securing economic
interests may seem far-removed from present-day notions of marriage as providing
a context for romantic love, companionship and the pursuit of individual happiness.
Coontz also makes clear that the romantic ideal of the love match is a relatively
recent innovation, with material considerations such as assets, skills and capabilities
likely to have informed one’s choice of spouse, and rapid and sustained social
change in the West since the industrial revolution has meant that our understanding
of marriage and family life continue to evolve.
In a more recent historical context, Talcott Parsons’s (1955) structural functionalist
model of the nuclear family, although highly influential in the post-war period,
already appears dated and oppressive. The highly gendered roles of husband as
breadwinner and wife as nurturer and homemaker, allocated the complementary
roles of paid employment and childcare, now appears suffocating. This narrow
model of White, suburban, middle-class family life may have proved to be more of a
straitjacket than a haven from the demands of modern industrial society.
Since the Second World War, dominant models of marriage as an institution, as
providing a dominant framework for adult life, have given way to a focus on
marriage as a context for companionship (Burgess and Locke, 1945), with the quest
for emotional satisfaction playing a greater role in individual choices around
marriage. The near universality of marriage in Western societies in the post-war era
(Kiernan, 2004, p. 980) has itself given way to a period of much greater diversity,
with options including cohabitation, divorce or remarriage becoming more viable, as
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