Civil partnership and ordinary marriages

Abstract

In the UK and elsewhere, civil unions and same-sex marriage signal the extent to which the everyday possibilities for same-sex relationships have altered radically in recent decades. Here, I consider how such possibilities were engaged with by ‘younger’ generations of same-sex civil partners prior to legalisation of same-sex marriage, and highlight a shift that is occurring in culturally dominant constructions of same-sex relational life. Until relatively recently, personal and broader cultural narratives of same-sex relationships were framed in terms of ‘otherness’. Nowadays, such narratives are as – if not more – likely to be framed in terms of ‘ordinariness’. Generational dynamics, as they are linked to social and legal developments, are key to understanding this shift, and I argue here that a generational sub-sector of relatively ‘young’ same-sex partners, who model their relationships on ‘the ordinary’, are poised to become the hegemonic – or culturally dominant – narrators of the new realities of same-sex relationships. The chapter begins by briefly outlining developments in the ‘privatisation’of marriage and the ‘intimate turn’ in same-sex relational cultures that are the backdrop to shifting personal claims about the distinctive or ordinary qualities of same-sex relationships. It then draws on a study based on joint and individual interviews with 50 couples, where both partners were aged up to 35 when they entered into in civil partnership, to consider how the majority interpreted and constructed civil partnership as a form of marriage. Following this it considers how couples compared their own formalised relationships to the heterosexual marriages they grew up with and lived alongside, and how they sought to achieve ‘good’ marriages by adopting ordinary – or conventional – marriage practices. In conclusion, I draw out how younger generational stories of ordinary same-sex marriages fit especially well with the claim that sexual minority battles for citizenship have been ‘won’, and also with mainstream claims about the continuing salience of marriage. By virtue of this fit, and the introduction of ‘full’ same-sex marriage in mainland UK in 2014, the story of same-sex relationalordinariness is poised to become a hegemonic one – even if it limits as much as it expands everyday understandings of relational ‘rights’, equality and citizenship.