No doubt there will be a lot of hand-wringing over this. People will phone Liveline saying The World's Gone Mad and What About The Children. (Beneath this concern lies the apparent assumption that children of married couples suffer more when their parents split up than children of cohabiting couples. It's hard to see how a legal contract can have anything to do with the humdrum heartache brought about by someone's absence at breakfast. ) The CSO revealed these not very surprising facts: the highest rates of marital breakdown occur among those in their 40s and 50s . . . isn't it obvious that 20-odd years of increasingly trivial conversation will do that? . . . and the rate declines sharply when people get into their 60s, and begin to suspect that in all likelihood there isn't anything better out there.

This news is hardly a bombshell, though.

For one thing, it's been just over 20 years . . . the period in which the increase is reported . . . since the first divorce referendum which, although it was defeated, nevertheless made the introduction of divorce a question of 'when', not 'if '.

Before that, people had no prospect of repenting one marriage at leisure only to enter in haste into another one.

But more to the purpose, what is the function of marriage now, in an age when neither God nor Mammon seems to expect it? Is it any wonder people are giving it up?

Call me an old cynic, but people get married for all sorts of reasons, and very few of them have much to do with romance. There are those who believe the Lord will stubbornly refuse to smile on their union without a witnessed signature, but they are in the minority.

Some people do it to get themselves into a more personally advantageous tax bracket.

Fortunately, there are no longer any compelling social welfare arguments for marriage, but some less starry-eyed lovers may be keeping in mind the fact that married victims of domestic violence are better protected legally than cohabiting ones. If you are married, you can get a barring order no matter how long you have been living together and even if your violent partner owns the house. If you're not married, you can only get a barring order if you've been living together for six out of the previous nine months, and if your spouse doesn't own the house. But in practice, not many people are speculating about barring orders at the altar.

Some people may get married because they want their children to have two legally recognised parents. Absurdly, a man who is not married to the mother of his children does not have automatic guardianship rights, and may have to apply for them through the courts.

Some couples are determined to get married because they're gay, and demand their right to suffer just as much as anybody else.

Then there are second marriages . . . better known as the triumph of hope over experience . . . which as often as not are a means of ensuring that it is the second wife and not the first who inherits the 40-acre farm (though really, why not just make a will? ) But apart from them, when most people get married it's because the time has come, not because the person has come. The life stage during which people dabble in serial courtships has often been compared to a protracted game of musical chairs: when the music stops, you just stay with whomever you're with. Out of fear that they won't be able to cope with the stigma of not being married, single people cave.

Then they begin to work the stigma on their unmarried friends. At best, they regard you condescendingly as a sort of social laggard or misfit. At worst they pity you, as if you hadn't been picked for the basketball team.

You nearly wouldn't mind if marriage was the same old venerable institution the world over, but people have diverse and daft ideas about it.

In Utah last week the trial got under way of Warren Jeffs, the leader of a fundamentalist Mormon community that believes a man must have three wives to enter heaven. Jeffs is charged with rape as an accomplice after he allegedly coerced a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-yearold cousin in 2001.

Of course, without marriage there would be very little old-fashioned comedy. Dictionaries of quotations would be meagre, single-volume affairs, suitable for reading on the toilet at a single sitting. Oscar Wilde . . . "Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same" . . . would have been stuck for material.

But antiquated tax and guardianship laws aside, there can be few good reasons for marriage now that (most) women are capable of providing for themselves financially. A dip into your toilet reading reveals what the fabulously unconventional Isadora Duncan had to say about marriage, at a time when most women could scarcely hope for anything more by way of a livelihood: "Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences."

Nowadays, a woman's brains are likely to have a material effect not only on her happiness in marriage but on the likelihood that she will bother to get married in the first place. If anything, it is women who will bring about the end of an institution on which they once depended.

But think: without marriage, there would be no marital breakdown statistics. The scrutiny of the morally hysterical would fall instead on all those unhappy couples who aren't married but are staying together anyway for the sake of the children, even though the law doesn't exhort them to. The floodgates stand ajar alright.