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3. GETTING MARRIED: WHY WOULD YOU?

      In my first summer in Britain I get taken to a lot of weddings. I feel out of place for a number of reasons. Back in America I had never attended the wedding of a friend. Nobody I knew had ever got married. Here in the UK, people my age hardly seem to be doing anything else. I’m happy for them, but I do not feel like someone heading in that direction at all. I’m at the very start of a relationship, and its long-term prospects are a little shaky. I’m not embarking on a new life so much as running away from my old one. Responsibility, commitment, adulthood: I’ve deliberately put as much distance – an ocean – between me and all that stuff as possible. I’m here to have fun. I’ll go home when it all goes wrong and suffer the consequences then.

      The main reason I feel out of place is that I don’t know anyone. I am foreign. In the past I may have sabotaged relationships through my maddening aloofness, but now – out of bald self-interest – I am as clingy a boyfriend as you could want. Wherever my girlfriend goes I go; wherever she stands I stand slightly behind her. But at wedding receptions we usually get put at different tables. I sit in front of place cards with the words ‘Plus 1’ on them, in the company of strangers. I sit with flower girls, vicars, the groom’s nanny, ex-neighbours of the bride’s parents. People don’t believe me when I tell them that I was once seated next to a pug, and that I didn’t really mind because there was no need for small talk and he had such beautiful manners. Perhaps I am exaggerating a little. He had beautiful manners for a dog.

      I have nothing against all these people who are getting married at my age. It just seems so heedless, this headlong leap into the future. What makes them think they’re ready for it? Why the hurry? What’s the point?

      In the meantime I am starting to wonder if my new girlfriend and I are actually compatible. Our relationship began as a sort of verbal sparring match – with me losing most of the time. Initially I was fine with this; it was amusing. In some ways it was the sort of relationship I’d always dreamed of – a spiky, muscular exchange that kept both parties on their toes. The first time I saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf I was actually envious of the dynamic (I’ve seen it since, quite recently, and I now get that it’s not supposed to be tremendous fun).

      But as we spend more time in the confines of her flat, perpetually low on funds, the sparring often gets combative. She can become disagreeable and hard to reach without much warning. As much as I admire her refusal to suffer fools gladly, I prefer it when the fool is someone other than me.

      She can also suddenly turn fragile if the wrong button is accidentally pushed. I find it difficult to respect someone’s forthrightness and their feelings at the same time, and I am aware that my increasing tendency to be at once defensive, cautious and needy is not an attractive thing in a man.

      My lack of independence doesn’t help matters. I’d run out of money not long after I’d arrived. My mental map of London is confined to a circle with a half-mile radius; I never go far on my own. The relationship is the same: everything outside its claustrophobic centre, where two people are arguing about the correct pronunciation of ‘beret’, is uncharted territory. She’s supposed to be my girlfriend, but I sometimes feel as if I’m just trying to navigate my way round a woman I don’t understand at all.

      At the time it didn’t occur to me that I was learning, through a tortuous process of trial and error, to be a grown-up. I just thought English women were really weird.

      I have a photograph from that first summer that sits on the shelf behind my desk. It’s just a creased snap, unframed, one I rescued from a drawer full of pictures that never made it onto any walls or into any albums. It shows both of us lying side by side in the long matted grass near a Cornish cliff, on top of the same red duffel coat she wore the night we met. My arms are wrapped round her from behind. She is smiling, her half-lidded eyes gazing sleepily at the camera lens. I look as if I might be asleep.

      I like this photograph because it is a lie. I remember clearly that she woke up that morning in a tricky mood, and that we argued on and off for most of the day. We argued right before that picture was taken, and right after. It actually captures a moment of supreme neediness on my part, and her smile is nothing but a brief, wry acknowledgement of her reluctance to tolerate my display of affection even for the time it takes a shutter to open and close.

      You can’t tell that from the picture, though. It just looks like two happy people lying on some grass. That’s probably why I never put it in a frame, but it’s also why I keep it where I can see it.

      Less than half the population is married. 231,490 people got married in England and Wales in 2009, which sounds a lot but was the lowest annual figure since 1895, and not much more than half the 1972 number. Cohabiting, meanwhile, has doubled since 1996. That makes me feel old, because I was already married in 1996.

      There are many good reasons not to get married. It costs, on average, £16,000. Divorce, a disease for which marriage is a necessary precondition, is also expensive, and your chances of avoiding it aren’t great. Roughly 40 per cent of UK marriages fail.

      If you are already living happily together as a couple, the change in status can hardly be said to be worth the outlay. There are some recently introduced tax advantages for the lawfully wedded, but you’d still have to be married for 106 years to break even. In terms of its impact on your personal life, marriage is much the same as cohabitation. I’ve tried both, and there isn’t a tremendous amount of difference. Either way, on the subject of what should happen to a towel when you’re done using it, you will always enjoy the benefit of a second opinion.

      In any case, there is nothing wrong with your cohabitational arrangement that marriage is going to fix. The PAIR project’s findings showed that among the couples who divorced soonest, a high percentage got married because they thought a wedding would somehow improve an already troubled relationship.

      Marriage will, as numerous studies have indicated, improve both your health and your longevity, especially if you’re a man (contrary to popular belief, marriage doesn’t actually reduce the life expectancy of women; it extends it, just not as much as it does for men). Never-married men are three times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than married men. Married men also have better cancer survival rates. But divorced men die sooner than married men, and you can’t be divorced unless you get married first.

      Most people have particular and deeply personal reasons for wanting to get married, and my primary motivation was, I like to think, as good as any: the Home Office forced my hand. Couples who live together without getting married will sometimes say things like, ‘We don’t need a piece of paper from the government to validate our relationship.’ Well, I did.

      From the beginning, being together proves difficult. Every time my six-month tourist visa nears its expiration, I have to go back to the States and make arrangements to return. It’s both expensive and heart-wrenching. Over the two years that my relationship with my English girlfriend develops, my relationship with the people at immigration deteriorates markedly. Each time I hand over my passport they seem less charmed by my tale of true love. My reasons for entering the UK strike them as implausible. They think I’m working in Britain illegally, and say as much.

      In fact all the travelling back and forth makes it impossible to secure proper employment in either country. I am broke. The periods in America are the hardest to endure, months spent living with my parents. They are supportive, but also quite clearly of the opinion that I am fucking up my life, squandering it in six-month chunks. Whenever I’m home I take odd jobs – anything, including painting my dad’s office – until I earn enough money for a cheap airline ticket. In an effort to impress the immigration officers with my continued commitment to US residency, I always show up with a return ticket on a flight a fortnight hence. It’s usually non-refundable, so I chuck it.

      Every time I come back they grill me for longer, make plainer their suspicions and threaten to send me straight home. I am a bag of nerves for weeks before each visit. Some

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