In 1971 the first-marriage rate in England and Wales was 82.3. In 1981 it was 51.7, and the figure dropped consistently until 2001, when it reached 25.5, and it has remained at around that level since then. Such a change, familiar in other western countries, has naturally caused some bewilderment, even alarm. People who are married, and remain married, can be shown, statistically, to enjoy better emotional and physical health, and to engage in less antisocial and criminal behavior, than nonmarried people. The construction of the decline of marriage as a problem because of its apparent adverse consequences may reflect hidden, or not-so-hidden, ideological assumptions about the desirability of marriage as an institution: or, put another way, assumptions that sexual relationships should only be developed within that institution. One might summarize the difference by saying that, whereas marriage used to be a socially prescribed context for the exercise of long-term sexual relationships and the raising of a family, the strength of that social prescription has declined to vanishing point. (Author abstract)