“Some people don’t like the phrase man and wife” – the campaign for equal civil partnerships
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There are lots of straight couples who don’t want to get married but worry about the financial and legal risks of cohabiting. Extending civil partnerships could be one answer – and the pressure is growing.
I can’t recall when my partner and I agreed we wouldn’t get married. It may have come up in discussions about our home lives: her parents had had an unpleasant divorce when she was young, which rather ruined the romance of marriage; my unmarried parents had had a rather pleasant separation, which left me unsure as to the point of the institution in general.
Over the years, though, this abstract opposition to marriage has become more concrete. Buying a (shared-ownership) house forced us to ask why we didn’t want the legal protections of marriage, to go with the intertwining of our lives in other respects. We were named in each others’ wills, paid bills and rent from a joint bank account and owned a house in common: why not make it all official?
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