People get married less and even less in church. Those who do it flaunt it in favor of social media (also to imitate the stars) and then get bored. In fact, there are more divorces, even when elderly, and people go back to swearing eternal love with gray hair. But even so, trying always makes sense
The American writer Joan Didion wrote in her most famous book The Year of Magical Thinking: “People have no idea what marriage really is.” A phrase that expresses a concept of complex, intimate nuptials, a unique and impossible to predict experience.
Today all this has been swept away, young people know very well what marriage is. And in fact they don’t get married anymore. «Or they do it with a consumerist approach, that is, if it doesn’t go well you go to the lawyer. The wedding ring on the finger is no longer an objective” explains the matrimonial lawyer Gian Ettore Gassani. «It was a tsunami, from the Seventies to today we have recorded a third less marriages. Even people in their seventies come to my office to separate, saying they want to start a new life.”
The latest Istat data speak of 184,207 marriages celebrated in 2023 (a decrease of 2.6 percent compared to the previous year). Religious rites drastically decreased (8.2 percent less). And the analysis of the first eight months of 2024 found a further reduction of 6.7 percent. But to really understand the collapse that hit the oldest contract in the world we need to look at 1963, the golden year of weddings, when 420,000 were celebrated in Italy. Today we who were the country of marriages find ourselves considering it as one option among many for entering family life. A reversible choice. No longer a rite of passage, but of confirmation.
According to the lawyer, there is an economic issue behind it: «In the South they still go into debt to pay for the banquet. You have to show off. Then comes real life and, where there is only one income, if the relationship collapses it leads to poverty. Breaking up in big cities is a very serious step. Finding a second home for the man who leaves is impossible. This family law penalizes fathers with low incomes. The middle class can be devastated by a divorce. Even women have understood that getting married and being mothers is for heroines. Without a policy that encourages couples to marry, there will be very little left.” But where has love gone? «When you can’t put the dish on the table, the passion disappears», concludes Gassani forcefully.
Seneca already stated it: it is not convenient for the wise man to marry. Maybe not even to the woman. Unless it’s Taylor Swift. The post of Travis Kelce’s proposal, kneeling among the flowers, received 30 million likes in a few hours, a record. A bitter reality emerges: marriage (and especially divorce) is a rich man’s business. For those who tell of overwhelming love born between Gstaad, Pantelleria, Formentera. Who fulfill their dream by renting the small Greek island where they had their first kiss or under the frescoed ceilings of the sixteenth-century family estate in the Siena area.
And we’re not just talking about Jeff Bezos, but about a trend that has been involving from aristocratic families to younger actresses for a few years. Celebrations that last at least three days, such as changes of clothes (a trunk of outfits is needed for him too), cascades of flowers and photo shoots taken by legends of the lens. From the Noto Valley to the noble Bolgheri up to the wild (very popular) Mexico. And if you thought you could get by with the usual “four pieces” for the gift, alas, what a mistake, now the bride and groom send you the IBAN directly (be careful, they look at who’s the little arm). You get married showing off your tail like a peacock, then maybe break up after a year. Thus Coma Cose, who recklessly declared: «Goodbye is not an option». The maximum duration (if it is luxury) is fifteen years.
“Yet we still do it for love despite social media continuing to send disturbing messages” observes Valeria Randone, clinical sexologist. «Everything on the web seems to be created for the show. Instead, the wedding ring on the finger has a spiritual meaning. Jacques Lacan spoke of extimacy to describe everything that is exposed, the opposite of intimacy. This word seems to dominate our time.” Status weddings are fragile, like tissue paper. «The crisis often arrives immediately after the birth of the first child. The man cannot stand it, he experiences abandonment anxieties because the mother is one with the child, he goes to look outside for narcissistic nourishment.”
There remain marked differences between the South, which tries tooth and nail to remain attached to traditions, and the more performing North, which has shifted to the work dimension even in relationships between two. «Over time, the couple has gone from a social fact to becoming a personal enterprise. A point of arrival, rather than departure. You invest everything in the other. When an inevitable weakness emerges, it collapses”, explains Raffaella Iafrate, professor of social psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. We are narcissists, individualists, the partner is at the service of our fulfillment. «When I read the formula to my students I add many “ifs”: I promise to be faithful to you, to love you as long as I feel like it. A few years ago they were scandalized, now they tell me that they are enormously afraid of “forever””, concludes the teacher, member of the University Center for studies and research on the family, founded in the Seventies.
Were we happier then? We asked Erich Puchner, a successful American writer, who had just released Dream State (Fazi), the story of a long marital relationship. «I think a lot of those marriages in the past were probably a mistake. My parents, for example, were quite unhappy in the last ten years of their union. They only stayed together for the sake of their children, managing to make us all miserable. I think many have dangerously unrealistic expectations. There is the myth of the “soul mate”. I am reminded of Levin’s character in Anna Karenina, who marries the woman of his dreams and is surprised to find himself spiritually lost, discovering that his unhappiness is not magically healed by domestic serenity. Too often, I believe, we confuse marital happiness with personal happiness.”
Laura Gramuglia, DJ and radio host, wrote a pop essay entitled Against Marriage (EDT): «The great Nora Ephron said: “We will never know what happens in other people’s marriages, yet we are terribly fascinated by them”. We are looking for the perfect recipe, but life as a couple is a great mystery. Perhaps perfection doesn’t exist and the statistics say that in the past, women who chose the convent lived longer than married ones.”
The wedding is arrived at calmly: the men are in their mid-thirties and the women are around thirty-three. «Cohabitations are increasing. It is the characteristic of the first unions of young people. It is as if a new stage in the family’s life cycle has developed. Religious marriages have decreased, but they are more conscious, a deliberate choice, the search for a bond other than the civil one. Once upon a time, when there was pressure from families, it was common to find unconvinced spouses at the altar”, reflects sociologist Elisabetta Carrà. You get married with your children walking or at least trotting. In 1970 only 2 percent of children were born out of wedlock, today it is a third.
The professor continues, full professor of Family Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan. «Civil and religious marriage are both exposed to separation. One way or another the instability is still strong. And living together doesn’t make it any stronger.” Maybe it’s because you arrive at the altar with few illusions and many disillusions. Maybe after a period of sluggishness you think of reviving with a sumptuous ceremony, even if the relationship is already struggling. When this consensus turns into silent silence, into a stagnant peace with a stale smell or, as Diego De Silva writes: «When nothing bothers you anymore because nothing touches you anymore, that’s when it’s over». His novel The End Credits of a Life Together (Einaudi) recounts the last act: «Whoever marries in the prime of his mental faculties knows that he is taking a rash, absolutely unjustified step. But they do it because they believe it has a romantic flavor, a binding force that will help them on their journey together. They have faith in that contractual agreement which symbolically and legally binds them. And here lies the recklessness. If this is the picture, why should two sane people take the step?”, asks the writer. «The answer is that it makes sense either at a very young age, when you are full of hopes and utopias, or when you are old. I, who am sixty years old, could do it with a certain amount of fun, knowing full well that I was playing with this great mistake.” You always have to try. And then, as Woody Allen said: “Many marriages end well, others last a lifetime.”
