Civil partnerships
Happy anniversary

Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Three years on, civil partnerships are going strong—especially among men

VALENTINE’S Day is a couple of months off, but this weekend many couples will be out celebrating. On December 21st it will be three years since civil partnerships—gay marriages in all but name—were introduced in England and Wales (Scots and Northern Irish registrars began one and two days earlier respectively). The pent-up eagerness of many couples to tie the knot created an early rush: nearly 4,000 people got hitched that December. Candlelit restaurants will be doing brisk business in the next few days.

By halfway through this year nearly 60,000 Britons had entered a same-sex union, giving them legal rights virtually identical to those of married couples. In contrast to their American counterparts, most British gays seem relaxed about not having the right to call their partnership a marriage. “It meant we could get the law through sooner. Changing the wording is not really a priority,” says a spokesman for Stonewall, a gay-rights lobby group. And speed is not everything: Denmark was the first country to recognise gay partnerships, in 1989, but still does not let them adopt children.

Gay couples getting hitched are older than straight ones: men are 43 on average and women 41, compared with 36 and 34 among straight couples (including those remarrying). And it seems that gay men, though often characterised as promiscuous, are settling down in greater numbers than lesbians. Men have out-partnered women in every quarter since civil partnerships were introduced; in London last year nearly 75% of those contracted were between men. Some unions have already broken down; but so far male partnerships have proved less likely than female ones to end in dissolution.

One explanation offered for this bias is that lesbian identity has been shaped by an anti-marriage strand of feminism. But that seems to fall down elsewhere: in Vermont, for example, the first American state to offer comprehensive civil unions, about two-thirds of partnerships are between women. It may simply be that Britain has more gay men than lesbians. The census does not pry that far, but the Office for National Statistics announced on December 4th that it would begin quizzing people about their sexuality next year in six of its regular surveys. Estimates broken down by age and region will be available in 2010.

It will be interesting to see if they tally with the government’s current guess that between 5% and 7% of the population is lesbian, gay or bisexual. Data on civil partnerships suggest that the last category might prove the most surprising: of those who have formed partnerships so far, a tenth of men and nearly a quarter of women were married before to someone of the opposite sex.