“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”. The news that the not wholly impecunious Earl Charles Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, has tied the knot for the fourth time, proves that at least this one man of good fortune is in want, not of a single wife, but of several of them.

Marriage and divorce are an unavoidably expensive business that usually leaves the male partner badly out of pocket

Spencer, 61, married his Norwegian girlfriend Professor Cat Jarman, an archaeologist 18 years his junior, in a sparsely attended ceremony in the United States that was notably different from his previous three high society nuptials. The newlyweds, who met in 2021 when Cat came to his Althorp estate in Northamptonshire to dig for a lost Roman village, were pictured against a background of Arizona’s big skies and red desert. It is an appropriately dry and dusty background perhaps, as they set out with more realistic than romantic expectations on the rocky road of marriage that both have trodden before. Spencer has seven children from his previous three marriages. Cat has two sons from her only previous marriage.

Some cynics may dismiss Spencer’s multiple marriages as the triumph of hope over experience. But, writing as a fellow serial monogamist, I would suggest that most men who repeatedly embark on matrimony despite previous disappointments are not necessarily irresponsible and heartless womanisers. They are more likely to be wild and careless romantics forever seeking, but failing to find, a perfect love.

Having once spent half a day in Earl Spencer’s company helping him to sign hundreds of copies of one of his popular history books, I know that he is in the latter category of frequent monogamists: an intelligent, if troubled, man whose own upbringing in a severely dysfunctional family didn’t put him off the institution of marriage. Indeed, he revered the state so much that he plunged into it again and again.

Spencer’s most recent book, A Very Private School, was not history but a memoir of his own boyhood hell in a British preparatory boarding school. As was frequently the case among upper crust boys sent to such schools, Spencer’s experience was one of sexual and physical abuse on an almost industrial scale; a nightmare that he writes about with refreshing, yet disturbing, honesty.

For all his privileges and wealth – his fortune is rumoured to be worth £150 million – few would deny that the Earl has suffered more than his fair share of misfortune, including his parents’ very messy divorce, the death of Diana, the controversial eulogy he gave at her funeral, and the sad ends of his first three marriages.

One of his reactions to this catalogue of tragedy and woe has been excessive drinking. Shortly before his latest wedding he and Cat told the world on social media that he had successfully gone without alcohol for a year.

So what are the pros and cons of marrying several times? For me at least the balance sheet is heavily weighted in the negative. It is best summed up in Philip Larkin’s lines from his masterpiece Aubade in which the poet laments: “The good not done/ The love not given/ Time torn off unused…”.

However painfully a marital relationship ends, most leave behind a residue of regret for not having done better. There is also the financial cost, of course; marriage and divorce are an unavoidably expensive business that usually leaves the male partner badly out of pocket.

More positively, beginning a new relationship afresh does have the joy of discovering an unknown personality, a new body, and learning to fit your personality, habits and needs around those of another.

An argument against marriage made by the French novelist Stendhal is that matrimony represents the death of love – or at least the erotic – habit. Repetition can tend towards boredom in the bedroom, and it is no accident that the columns of Agony Aunts are replete with advice on tricks and techniques to keep sex lives within long term marriages novel and exciting.

My own final depressing verdict is that marital disappointment is the chief leitmotif of life, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing Earl Spencer and his fourth Countess my very best wishes for a long and happy marriage.