I would never marry again for love

But I'd marry for something else, perhaps

Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

The other week I was in my local community gym where everyone knows everyone. I don’t just love it because it’s free of the things people normally hate about gyms - ego, topless idiots, posters advertising cosmetic work- but because it puts me in the proximity of people I might not otherwise socialise with. For instance, the 20-something woman I was chatting to, who was asking me about marriage.

We were doing a strength class which is also something of a social catch-up, and she had been talking about relationships and dating, and how hard it was to meet someone who communicated properly and knew what they wanted.

“Would you ever get married?” she asked me and another gym friend, a woman who is in her late thirties and in a long-term relationship with a man. My gym friend replied that she wouldn’t because she and her partner didn’t feel the need for it, and just as I was about to answer, the young woman was called to the platform to lift her loaded barbell.

Had she not been called away, I would have given the same answer I’ve trotted out over the past few years, when people have asked me about remarrying after my husband Rob passed away in 2015. Which is: if I happened to meet someone that I loved enough to commit to a long term partnership, and they were keen to get married because they hadn’t done it before, I would probably get remarried. I didn’t feel that strongly about marriage that it would be a dealbreaker for me, in the way that it is for some people who’ve been scarred by the breakdown of their parents’ marriages or their own.

But in the soft, pouchy silence that gathered in the space of words unsaid, I thought: hang on, is that still true? And I realised no, something has changed in recent years, and certain conversations have clarified how I feel about getting married again.

Some of that is due to some of the problematic beliefs around marriage raised in the latest season of Love Is Blind UK, where people propose sight unseen and then get married (or not) in the space of four weeks. Some of it is seeing friends at different ends of the marriage spectrum – some desperately wanting to get married, and others dealing with the long shadow and messiness of divorce.

And a lot of it is due to just finishing my manuscript for my non-fiction book She Wanted More out in February, which covers marriage and whether it is equitable for women, if you’re marrying a man.

***

I’ve already written at length about mine and Rob’s marriage and so I won’t go over it again, but sufficed to say that it was a difficult one. Not because I didn’t love him, or because he didn’t have good qualities – he remains one of the most beloved, clever and remarkable people I have ever met. But because Rob had struggled with mental ill health for most of his life, and had a co-morbidity in the form of addiction.

I didn’t know about a lot of it until after we were married but, I believe that had there been less pressure around the love to marriage narrative (and this didn’t just come through culturally but from every single societal orifice), and a more accurate understanding of what marriage actually is, perhaps we would have had a more honest conversation around it, rather than expecting it to be a bandaid that would save him from his desire to be ‘normal’ and my desire to be someone worth loving.

When I wrote the marriage chapter for She Wanted More, it opened my eyes to a lot of things around marriage, from the conversations that happen before it (or lack thereof), to why we do it, to what happens when we are then in it. The overall purpose of the chapter was to get women to think about whether marriage was for them, and for those who were already married, to learn from people who kept their marriages going in a way that was sustainable and felt like partnership, and that it was possible to grow and evolve over time.

It got me thinking about my own marriage, in particular when I was so focussed on the goal of getting married, before I even met Rob. In retrospect, it felt as if there was a hyper focus on getting married, but not enough or any chat about what it was like to actually be married and the challenges that might arise. I was told that I needed to find someone, fall in love with them, and the natural conclusion of that love would lead to me getting married and achieving a big life milestone. I was told that then, I would not have to worry about being alone, and I would have a life partner who would be my witness and my support in everything, good and bad.

The short version of the story is that I married for love, and the biggest issues that cropped up in our marriage had little to do with that love. Although our problems were significant and unusual compared to most - heroin addiction and chronic depression - this premise that you fall in love, and that leads to marriage and that the love should be enough to sustain the marriage, is now causing havoc for people my age and younger. Because love isn’t self-sustaining, and it definitely isn’t nourished by the annoying, humdrum but necessary life admin that arises from living together, raising children together. And marriage isn’t about love, not really.

It’s about your capacity to co-exist and grow and evolve and build a life together. And as unsexy as it sounds, that isn’t about love. That is about things like finances. The kind of old age you might want to have, and the grace needed from your partner if this changes over time. How you want to raise your children from ethics to religion to politics. How you even view running a household together.

One of the things I learned about, from writing the book, is that when marriage was first introduced (2350 BC, in Mesopotamia), it was purely about money, stability and alliances. Over time, starting in Europe, in the era of the Enlightenment (primarily in the 18th century) it became about marrying for love.

While I come from a culture that does practice arranged marriages, my family has a mixed history with it. Both sets of grandparents married for love and were shunned in different ways by their families for it, while my parents and all of their siblings barring one, had arranged marriages. My sister and I however, as well as most of my cousins, all married for love.

The idea we have of marriage, met with the reality of what marriage is, requires redefinition, therefore. I don’t mean this as an attack on people who are getting married or who are already married. When I read the answers submitted for my She Wanted More survey, it was clear that enough people felt the positive benefits of being married, particularly around support from their partner. But when we consider statistics, marriage is declining overall globally, and in the UK, the number of 25-35 year olds who are unmarried has more than doubled.

There is a lengthy piece that should be written around why this is, but if I think back to the anonymous answers submitted in from married people for the survey, the main problem is the romanticisation of marriage, the idea that marriage will fix the problems in your life or give you status.

We saw it play out in Love Is Blind UK over and over again when people wailed about wanting to find Their Person - the problematic belief that there is one person who is made just for you. They talked about ‘forever love’ but what I heard instead were people who were desperately lonely, and trying to fill that void with another person. It is no surprise that the weddings that either didn’t happen or blew up spectacularly a few weeks after tying the knot, were the ones in which there were deep incompatibilities around lifestyle and financial choices. They all learned the hard way that love cannot strong-arm a marriage into being successful.

***

To answer the question: would I get married again for love? No, I wouldn’t. If I were in love with someone, I would happily commit to a relationship, but I don’t feel the need to validate that with marriage. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t get married again.

If I met someone I wanted to build a life with, and they wanted to get married as well, I could see myself getting married. But I am never again getting married without having a chat about finances beforehand, from how we manage it, to the full list of assets they have, and I have, including any debt.

A friend looked surprised when I said this, and I said that the legal implications of marriage are no joke, especially when finances are involved. When you consider how much your life will be impacted during the course of your marriage if someone mis-manages their finances and doesn’t tell you about it, not to mention the difficulties of disentangling your finances during divorce, and how much worse off women are financially after divorce compared to men, it’s a conversation you cannot afford not to have.

I am never getting married again without knowing some of their health history and crucially - how they deal with things when they are in ill health. And other things I have learned along the way, including that when you marry, you aren’t just marrying them, you are marrying their family. I was gifted a boon in my late husband’s family who I adore, but I have seen a number of friends struggle with their partner’s difficult family members, and have ended up being financially and emotionally affected too. This is not to invalidate people in long term relationships who are dealing with their partner’s families - it is more to say that for me, if my partner’s family was toxic and my partner was incapable of defending me to them, or prioritising me, marriage would feel like far more of a straitjacket in this situation.

That doesn’t mean I need all of these things to be in place before I get into a relationship. But if I am getting married again, it absolutely needs to be. I have learned the hard way that as much as I want to believe a marriage leads with love, it also leads with trust, respect and transparency, especially around the things that make up a life.

Perhaps it is my own experience, but I want to avoid the mistakes I’ve made in the past. If I ever get married again, love is still essential, but there has to be more. And I think we are doing people a disservice by not being honest about it, and it allows us to make the most damaging conflation of all. Which is, that if we are loved, we are somehow worthy, or special, when the truth is that if you do not feel self worth, no amount of love in the universe will be able to fill that void. And certainly not marriage.

She Wanted More, published by Bonnier, is out Feb 2026. You can pre-order here!

For UK/Boycott-friendly pre-orders, Waterstones is selling it here.

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