Marriages are supposed to be made in heaven — not in dilapidated local authority registry offices. My wife and I were getting a civil marriage, as our Islamic wedding the previous year, for all its ceremonial pomp, had been a statutory nullity. Others elope from their families; we’d eloped from the law. It was out of laziness at first, then — maybe — something else. We were on board with a spiritual union in fulfilment of a romantic aspiration, but did this sentiment really need to be ratified by the state? “Marriage is an institution,” Groucho Marx once quipped. “But who wants to live in an institution?”
What the modern sensibility reveres is the marriage of hearts and minds — not of legal entities, or strands in the social fabric. Being admitted to this institution, via its bureaucratic rituals — interrogation by a council official, signing a register, publicly exchanging vows with a wording enshrined, to my surprise, in statute — reminded me of the civic nature of marriage. Deciding to get married, and whom to marry, is in addition to being a personal choice, a political one. It involves much larger questions than simply the conundrum of desire: questions about community, and where we slot into the society around us.
With this sudden realisation, I wondered what it meant that every couple waiting at the registry office was of the same race. All appeared to have “married in”. I should not have been surprised. In multicultural Britain, most marriages are still between members of the same ethnicity. Only 10% of households comprise an “inter-ethnic cohabiting couple”, to use the ONS vernacular. Perhaps, for the white majority, it’s simply the likeliest outcome to fall for someone of the same race (only 4% of white people do otherwise). But ethnic minorities marrying primarily among their own, rather than into the generality, is quite against the odds. Yet that is what transpires. British-Asians — of whom 90% marry in — are the most exclusive, compared with 60% of black Britons. Among all minority groups, though, something greater than the free play of attraction seems to be at work in the choice of a life partner.
I’m a British-Asian; so is my wife. Our marriage wasn’t arranged, and is thus what Indian-English calls, often with a hint of scandal, a “love marriage”. We’re both journalists, and since the society around us is our subject-matter and our audience, we’ve had to be pretty well-integrated into it. We are not entirely secular, since we do practise a religion — not a popular one these days — but in a fashion our peers would approve as “moderate”. Our marriage followed Western norms of individual choice more than South Asian norms of parental orchestration. Nevertheless, we have done as most ethnic minorities do: we married in.
Why does this matter? “Ethno‐religious intermarriage is regarded as the most complete form of social integration,” the demographer David Voas has said. “Its frequency is therefore of public interest.” If marriage is an institution, it’s apparently a segregated one, which surely offends Left and Right equally. That liberals trumpet diversity while conservatives favour assimilation normally results in disagreement, but on this issue, their values lead to the same conclusion; ethnic in-marriage is a failure of diversity and of assimilation.
For a long time, popular culture has therefore been unanimous in promoting a vision of all ethnicities coming together through intermarriage in society’s great melting pot. That phrase itself we get from a play by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. The Melting Pot — from 1908 — sees a Jewish refugee from Russia, David, falling in love with a Christian woman, Vera. He writes a symphony celebrating the melting away of distinctions between “East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross.” Vera is so moved that she marries David.
Much of what I watched, while growing up, told the same story: classic movies like West Side Story and Pocahontas, Hollywood franchises like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the breakout films of the South Asian diaspora, Mississippi Masala and Bride and Prejudice. All insist that the model minority integrates through marriage. The cultural signals were often more subtle. By the time I got to university, for instance, the message was underscored in the notion of “hybridity” — then all the rage in literary theory — which saw culture itself as the fruit of crossbreeding. Our future was hybrid, we were told, and race, like gender, was a boundary to be transgressed.
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