Marriage is in trouble in Britain, says psychologist Harry Benson, Research Director for the U.K.’s Marriage Foundation. And lest those in the United States relax, American trends tend to mirror those of its cousin across the pond.

“Move away from marriage, and you find greater risks to almost all aspects of life,” Harry said. “We have forgotten this, and the consequence is the highest level of family breakdown in recorded history. Marriage is not perfect, but it’s the best model we have to make society work.”

Like an Olympic champion bearing a nation’s standard, so too does Harry wave a flag for marriage, working to restore confidence in the family form that is the bedrock of society. “Our job at Marriage Foundation is to tell a better story through the media, and we are good at it,” he said.

Harry’s worked with the Marriage Foundation since it formed in 2012 under the direction of former Family Court High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge. Harry pores through statistics on divorce rates, marriage rates, outcomes, date nights, happiness and mental health to discover trends and find ways to promote and prosper marriage. He soon will complete a Ph.D. in social policy from the School for Policy Studies at Bristol University. Harry collaborates frequently with prominent U.S. researchers like Dr. Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Dr. Scott Stanley and Dr. Galena Rhodes at the University of Denver.

“All of us want reliable love, a relationship that works, children who turn out healthy and well,” he wrote in a 2019 policy paper for Marriage Foundation. “The research we have produced over the past seven (at the time) years – together with some of the world’s leading researchers – shows that marriage, for all its faults, provides the surest foundation upon which these things are most likely to happen. Our work has shown that those who marry are far more likely to remain together as parents and to bring up children without mental health problems (Benson & McKay 2017a, 2018a). For those who don’t marry, the odds are stacked against staying together.”

“As a society we’ve lost faith in the benefits of marriage, one of which is that it’s the best chance of getting the reliable love we all want,” he continued. “Marriage is the ultimate step of bringing clarity to a relationship and resolving any lingering ambiguity about where one stands.

“Ambiguity is one of the biggest relationship killers,” according to Harry. “If you don’t know where you stand, you can’t sacrifice, can’t forgive. You are not going to put your life on the line for somebody else if you don’t have a clear sense of future together. That’s what a long-term commitment and an unambiguous relationship (found in marriage) give people.”

Harry believes societal trends shifted in the 1960s with the advent of the birth control pill, which, while offering women more freedom and reproductive choice, also liberated men from the need to commit – a problem whose answer he considers the real question for this age.

“At one time the social function of marriage was to bond men with the mothers of their future children to avoid having a chaotic society,” he said. “As much as we love lone parents, they will tell you how difficult it is (to raise children on their own). They need support from friends and family or the state.”

“Our research was the first to show that unmarried cohabitation is the main driver of instability. The 21% of couple parents who are not married account for 51% of all family breakdown involving children (Benson 2017a),” he wrote. “Family stability can and will be strengthened by a return to formal commitment and marriage.”

Harry points to the secularization of Britain, where only 1-2% of people are actively involved in church or worship. “Faith as a motivation for marriage isn’t there. We need to discover a secular language that reaches a new population and defines the need to form healthy relationships in the first place.”

“The reason why encouragement to marry will increase stability is that discussing plans for the future, and then making a decision about it, will bring greater mutual clarity and intent than might otherwise have been the case had the couple continued without making a formal commitment … Now our work enters a new phase, where we aim to rebuild confidence in marriage for the good of society, especially children,” he wrote.

Prior to joining start-up Marriage Foundation, Harry founded a charity called Bristol Community Family Trust, where he led thousands of pre-marital couples through an adaptation of America’s PREP course and developed and taught Let’s Stick Together, a pioneering program for new parents evaluated by the Department for Education and delivered mainly through NHS post-natal clinics. At its peak, Bristol Community Family Trust reached one-third of all first-time mothers in that area, he said.

A conversation with Dr. Rhodes inspired Harry to pivot from the work he’d been doing directly to come aboard as Director of Research when Sir Paul started Marriage Foundation.

Harry realized, “We do so much better if we don’t have to sort out the marriage problems and get people to form happy and healthy relationships in the first place. The real impact is going to be getting the foundations right.”

He referenced the rocky time in his own marriage, where he and his wife of 38 years, Kate, would have split up if they wouldn’t have been married. “We stuck at it because we were married. We had an assumption we were together for the long term. We survived the bad times because of that commitment.”

The couple met and married when Harry was a dashing young helicopter pilot just returning from the war in the Falklands. They were living abroad in Hong Kong and Bangkok, where Harry pursued a career in finance and Kate stayed home raising the eldest of their six children.

Like many couples busy raising young families, the Bensons drifted apart.

Harry’s PTSD from war and emotional distance from his family of origin caused him to be closed off at home. During their sojourn in Asia, Kate became a Christian, which “made things worse,” Harry said, because “Jesus turns the lights on and shows you the truth in the messy room.”

Finally, Kate, aided by her vicar and wife, confronted Harry with an ultimatum. If he did not change in a year and offer her the friendship and emotional support she needed, she would leave.

Harry remembers being blindsided by her concerns. He knew he wanted to save his marriage, at first for the children’s sake, but eventually realized, “I needed to take responsibility. My priority has to be to make this work for Kate.” During this time Harry, too, accepted Christ, and as the couple began finding a route back to each other, they decided to relocate and put down roots in their homeland.

Even though their relationship was still a work in progress, Harry felt a “deep sense of calling” to help marriages and families – for the sake of all the other “Kate and Harry’s out there” who don’t need to fracture their families if they can just get some practical help.

“There’s so much family breakdown that shouldn’t happen,” he said.

They met with Nicky and Sila Lee, authors of The Marriage Course, and Harry completed a degree in Psychology and began teaching pre-marital classes in Bristol to help young people start their marriages off on the right foot.

He writes about his trials in a letter to “Troubled Couples” posted on Marriage Foundation’s website.

“If you’ve come to this page of the Marriage Foundation website because your marriage is in difficulties I am writing this for you. Maybe you don’t know what to do. Maybe you want some ideas to restore some of that freshness and joy that you once had and dream of again. Maybe you’re about to get divorced. Maybe your spouse is having an affair. Maybe you’re having an affair. Maybe your spouse won’t listen. Maybe your spouse won’t talk. Maybe you’ve grown apart and don’t feel the love you once did.

“Whatever the reason, I want to offer you a message of hope. If that sounds patronizing or empty, please bear with me and read a little further. It might help you to know that my wife Kate and I have been through dire straits ourselves. From near divorce, we’ve learnt that it is really possible to rebuild something new and stronger than we ever had before.”

He advises couples:

(1) You need to learn how to communicate and handle conflict together

(2) You need a friendly couple who will support you.

This information echoes content in the book he co-wrote with Kate, What Mums Want (and Dads Need to Know), which eventually hit number 11 on Amazon UK. Their practical lessons include four steps:

1. Choose to value your marriage

Choosing to value your marriage is all about commitment. Commitment means choosing to put your marriage first. Commitment means thinking about your marriage in terms of a long future together.

2. Get properly informed

Start by reading a book that tells you why marriages go wrong and what people can do to make them go right. Then you’ll at least have a better idea of what YOU can do to influence things more positively.

Much of it boils down to two words – Commitment and Kindness.

3. Get properly skilled

Most couples split up because they have grown apart. A great way to make progress is to attend a marriage or relationships course. Much of what goes wrong in most relationships can be sorted out through better communication, better handling of differences and better attitude.

4. Get properly supported

The best people to help marriages in trouble are ordinary couples who have experienced marriage trouble themselves and survived.

They exhort couples: “Now you go to it. You have a spouse. You don’t need another one. Don’t throw your marriage away.”

Harry’s latest battle is with uncommitted cohabitation, because “when relationships break up, children pay the price.” He bristles when accused of being anti- lone parent. “Ridiculous! I have huge respect for them. I’m simply in the business of helping couples get a better outcome and stay out of the situation of having only one pair of hands. A lot of it is down to commitment. We turned our backs on marriage in the developed world and family breakdown and lone parent formation has gone up.”

Harry (whose children include four young adult daughters) explains the popularity of Taylor Swift as one who voices the frustration of young women who have been let down by men who are reluctant to commit. He referenced a Sunday Times article that explained the origin of Taylor’s song titled, “So Long, London,” which tells the backstory of her six-year relationship with her British boyfriend, Joe. Lyrics include, “I died on the altar waitin’ for the proof.”

“She’s talking about being let down by a boyfriend who’s strung her along for years,” Harry said. “Birth control has allowed men not to commit. Somehow, we have to find ways to empower young women who want certainty and reliability.”

He addresses this problem, along with cohabitation without a plan, in his 2020 book, Commit or Quit: The ‘Two Year Rule’ and other Rules for Romance. 

“Be careful about moving in together,” he said, “because you run the risk of getting trapped in a relationship that is much more difficult to get out of with no clear path to the future.”

He words it strongly, “If you don’t make a plan, cohabitating is stupid. Cohabitating adds constraint to a relationship. You’ve restricted yourself. You can slide into cohabitation, but you have to decide to get out.

“Couples who get the inner part right – the dedication to each other and their decision to marry before moving in together – are linked to much greater stability later,” he added.

He advises couples to put a two-year deadline on dating. “If you’re over 25, after two years, you know whether this is going to work or not – get on with it and resolve the ambiguity. Make a commitment. Get married.”

Harry describes the psychology of marriage as two-fold: The first is the proposal – which shows you are making a clear decision about the future – you are buying into something. Things can go wrong, but you are making a plan and giving it your best shot. It removes ambiguity and signals, “This is where I stand, we are on the same page and have symmetry of commitment.”

And for the most part, in society today, men are still the askers. A proposal shows that a man is committed.

Next is the importance of a public ceremony. “Studies show that the more people you have at your wedding, the more successful your marriage will be,” Harry said. Although he cautions against interpreting this finding to mean couples should spend outrageous amounts of money on a fancy party. In fact, research showed overspending removes some of the protective benefits of quantity.

“Culturally we’ve persuaded people they need to go through these ludicrous hoops to get married,” he said. “Having a larger number of witnesses is about social affirmation. The bride and groom are taking a monumental risk of saying ‘yes’ to one person and ‘no’ to all others forever. Making that declaration in front of one’s friends and families makes an important statement about commitment.

“It doesn’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) about the wedding, but make it important, whatever you do,” Harry said. It’s the commitment that counts.

Harry points to the rise of people cohabiting rather than committing to marriage and plummeting marriage rates as factors in family breakdown.

“We have got to deal with this problem,” he emphasized.