Finally, I can say ‘I don’t’ to marriage
A new law allowing mixed-sex civil partnerships means the end of wedding-day nightmares for Hannah Betts
Something rather stupendous happened in Parliament yesterday. No, not some labyrinthine Brexit development you blessedly missed. Instead, the final reading of the Civil Partnerships, Marriages and Deaths (Registration etc) Bill received approval, at long last allowing mixed-sex civil partnerships in England and Wales. The Bill is set to become law within a matter of days. Allowing for implementation, this means that opposite-gender partnerships should be available by the end of the year. Over and above the fact that this puts gay and straight relationships on an equal footing, for a small band of diehard conjugal refuseniks such as myself, the news will be met with euphoria.
Conventional wisdom has it that it is every little girl’s dream to be metamorphosed into a bride, a princess, a billowing white cloud. I am no exception, only mine has been a recurrent, Angela Carter-esque nightmare. In it my dress is a shroud, the groom a vampire, my train snaking around my throat removing first speech, then all vital signs. I wake suffocating, the horror no different at 47 than it was at seven.
I am a lifelong sufferer of gamophobia, or fear of marriage. It’s easy to be phobic about weddings, those egomaniacal displays of conspicuous consumption. The average wedding costs a grotesque £30,355, according to latest figures, up from £26,989 in 2017. However, I am clearly not the only individual whose horror extends beyond the hoopla to the institution itself, when the only reason our divorce statistics have plummeted is that so few Brits are getting hitched in the first place.
Only now, we objectors are to be presented with another option. Finally – almost 15 years after civil partnerships became available to same-sex unions, and five after these couples secured the right to marry – heterosexuals will also have the right to contracts that provide the same legal rights as marriage without any of the bull----. For people like me aren’t “scared of commitment”, as we are so often accused. Far from it: we want a commitment. We just couldn’t stomach the idea of the one that was available.
I’ve just about managed to get to the point where I don’t act up at other people’s nuptials. However, I still regard the state of marriage as untenably loathsome. As an atheist, a feminist, and an individual wary of both state and communal investment in private relationships, I find the baggage it inherits stomach turning. My gamophobia lies at the very core of my being – conscious, subconscious, and likely to induce head swivelling when yet another adult female in faux virgin white is handed from one man to another in some pastiche of Victorian high camp.
Many feminists put a less Stepford mark on their ceremonies, and go on to draw great strength from their marriages, considering themselves to have reinvented its limits. Personally, I find this as impossible a notion as the idea that one could somehow reinvent slavery. Marriage is the sum of its history; a history that encompasses subordination, drudgery, property theft – and, within my lifetime – the legal impossibility of rape. Not only would I be mortified to participate in such an arrangement, I would be ashamed to bring children up in it. Shame was traditionally associated with the unmarried state; in my case, matters would be the other way around.
For me, marriage is banal, anachronistic, and politically dubious; a piece of ugly ideological furniture incompatible with modern life. In contrast, civil partnerships present a clean-slate: a deliberately unceremonious agreement that enshrines the rights and responsibilities of marriage, stripped
of its smells and bells. They provide not “mock marriages”, as some critics maintain, but anti-marriages; which is why some gay couples felt insulted by them, striving for the same wedding rights as straights. For me this prosaicness can only be an advantage: the “unromantic” option to sign something, go home, and forget about it. I don’t want the fog of “romance” obfuscating the reality of law – nor blinding me to more genuine emotions.
My partner and I started cohabiting last September, and had to draw up a costly “non-nup”, detailing what will happen to the property should he and I part. Next, we will be embarking upon wills so that, when I die, he, and not my siblings, will receive my share in our home. Why should our ideological objections to marriage bar us from the tax advantages associated with it? My parents’ deaths have made me realise that, were I on life support, I would want my beloved and not my brothers and sisters in charge of the switch. Not necessarily because they’d off me – although relations do vary – but because he would be more up-to-speed with my desires.
Even in the swinging Sixties and Seventies, marriage remained a fundamental rite of passage for the vast majority. No more. The 2011 census results revealed that, for the first time, married households are now a minority. More Britons are unwed than wed, with traditional family units feeling increasingly old hat. Society is at a tipping point where being single – or some variation on the theme, for at least a proportion of one’s adult life – is becoming the norm, getting hitched the aberration. Not only is it equitable to offer heterosexuals another means to express coupledom, it is practical; in a way that is arguably not radical, but conservative (as befits Theresa May, one of its supporters).
Last night, I had a new dream. In it, my boyfriend and I acquired a civil partnership: an act that was private, unceremonious, uncelebrated – and filled me with joy. I look forward to not proposing to him.
Society is at a tipping point where being single for at least part of one’s adult life is becoming the norm