KEY POINTS:
Today, like every other Saturday, is a day that several hundred New Zealanders will never forget. They fixed this date many months ago and have planned its activities down to the last corsage and place card. It is of course their wedding day. All told, 21,500 weddings were held in New Zealand last year, according to figures released by Statistics NZ this week. That was an increase on the 20,800 average of the past decade. Marriage, it seems, has life in it yet.
Its long decline over recent decades turns out not to be terminal, merely transitional. Social trends since the 1960s - notably the opening of careers to women and more reliable birth control - have resulted in later marriage, not less. The median age of men who got married last year was nearly 30, and for women it was 28. In 1971 the average groom was 23 and his bride was not quite 21.
Easier divorce was another social trend of the period, the annual rate peaking at 12,400 in 1982 after the law permitted marriages to be dissolved on grounds of irreconcilable differences. One in three of the couples married that year failed to reach their silver wedding anniversary in 2007. But divorce was down last year, 9600 against an annual average of 10,000 in the past decade. Clearly the higher marriage rate was not just a reflection of first time failure.
Society might not be going to hell in a handcart after all. If anything, it is probably healthier than it was a generation ago. Young people are delaying marriage until their late 20s or early 30s when they can make the decision with much more maturity than their parents probably did.
Yet their weddings have lost none of the fun, frills, romantic symbolism and traditional trappings of the time-honoured ceremony. In this, as with many other traditions of courtship, today's younger generation seem to have more in common with their grandparents than the baby-boom generation that parented them.
Baby-boomers who scorned the notions of dating, formal proposals, engagement rings and full blown bridal splendours, may be quietly bemused at their children's embrace of the whole back-catalogue. But bemusement is tinged with a good deal of pleasure and probably some envy too.
Marriage is worth doing properly, proudly, traditionally and religiously. Formal marriage is prospering in a way that the recently contrived legal equivalent, civil union, is not. The statistics for 2007 record just 316 civil unions and 21,500 marriages and of the civil unions 253 were same sex partnerships that are denied formal recognition as marriage.
The civil union legislation was passed to many a claim that it would also be the preference of many modern heterosexual couples. That has proved to be so much hot air - the last blast of baby-boom iconoclasm perhaps. There have been just 231 civil unions of opposite sex in the three years since the law was passed and the number of couples who have transferred from married status is exactly two.
Baby boomers are in power and their prejudices will persist in law for a little while yet. A case in point was the Government's dismissal last week of the proposition that each partner in a marriage should be able to be taxed on half their combined incomes. It is prepared to evaluate that idea only as a form of state support for children, not as a benefit of a commitment the state could encourage.
A generational change of power could happen at this year's election. It has already happened outside politics in business, fashion and social habits. The generation that is marrying, not in haste but at ease with tradition, brings a refreshing good spirit to our national life.
