However, today's generation of brides, born between 1976 and 1981, is for the first time more likely to "marry down" than "marry up". While the majority, 56 per cent, marry in the same class, those choosing a spouse from a lower social class account for 28 per cent, while only 16 per cent of women are marrying men from higher social backgrounds. One women born in 1981 who, it could gently be argued, "married down" is Princess Anne's daughter Zara Phillips, who wed the middle-class rugby player Mike Tindall last year.
The IPPR suggests that one cause for the shift in marriage patterns is the changing jobs market since the war. In the 1950s and 1960s, deindustrialisation and the growth of women working in junior office jobs led to a trend of "marrying the boss", the report says. But as inequality grew in the 1980s, with losses of blue-collar, middle-tier jobs, education became more closely linked to occupation, and social class began to "harden its grip on who people met and subsequently married".