Hooray ! At last Civil partnerships for heterosexual couples. So what are those who don't believe in marriage going to make of that.

[Fontofnoknowledge]

Just seen this is going to come into law. AIBU thinking that all those (mostly but not exclusively) men , who 'don't believe in marriage ' - will now have to think of another excuse to keep their assets from their partners ..

I know I sound like a broken record, but it's telling how many of the men who refuse to marry a partner who is more financially vulnerable, aren't willing to put in place a cohabitation agreement

I find it baffling how few people who DO want the rights and responsibilities of marriage but don't want to get married, don't have a cohabitation agreement in place.

Yep - it will be exactly that OP. The excuses will be legion.

I suppose "Why change anything now? After all we've been together 10/20 years, we're ok so.. " is as good an excuse as any.

Meanwhile women who are "keeping their independence" by having several kids for and shacking up with a man, may see CPs as a good option, but - I've a mind their men won't. No matter what they claim.

Let the excuses begin

Oh goody. A way to protect those you dont love enough to marry.

can posters please, please, please stop talking about 'upgrading' CPs to Marriages. There is no upgrade - couples have the same legal rights (in England and Wales) as each other. The legislation allows for CPs to be converted to marriages - not UPGRADED. I have said a number of times on threads such as these - CPs are not Marriage lite. There are the same legal processes beforehand, and the similar legal processes required to dissolve them. The dissolution rate for CPs will be equable to marriages. People are people regardless of the name afforded to their legal union.
The main differences are semantics - like how you enter into the legal relationship and what you are legally known as (wife/husband/cp). Although most CPartners have generally referred to each other as husbands or wives. On death, you are legally a surviving CP rather than a widow(er). The lack of knowledge and the espousing of shite as facts (such as register office weddings are second class) is depressing.

It's just virtue signalling how non- conventional you are

That occurred to me too. Personally, I'd be wondering why I wasn't good enough to be married to.

Somehow I don't think there's going to be a stampede to the Register Office.

need I only used the word upgrade as that's how my gay and lesbian friends described their decision to convert from CP to marriage

They felt CP was 'lesser than' because it had been granted as a way of othering gay couples - as though they weren't worthy of true marriage equality

If CP and marriage had both been made available at the same time for same sex couples to have their relationships legally recognised, so it was an either / or at the time, then that would have been one thing. But CP was created specifically for same sex couples to exclude them from marriage - so from an LGBT point of view the differences are rather more than semantics

What's the difference between this and marriage

Need you have no right to tell me or any other gay person how to refer to CPs. I absolutely talk about upgrading to marriage as this is how I see it.

With marriage I can finally have my romantic and loving union recognised fully, and I can legally call my wife my ‘wife’.

We never lobbied for CPs, we lobbied for equal marriage, which we still do not fully have in terms of religious marriages. CPs were invented to shut us up for a bit.

Unless you are me, don’t tell me how I should feel. I only have 1 friend who didn’t want to convert to marriage, and that was more to do with the state of their relationship than their feelings about marriage v CPs.

CP is an upgrade to those in same sex partnerships though. They were denied marriage before. They now thankfully aren't. This whole mixed sex partners wanting CP is just pathetic to be honest. We already had marriage. CP is the same thing with a different name. I think actually it is more restricting in that you cannot have anything religious mentioned, whereas you can in marriage if you want.

I am surprised although relieved that people are annoyed by this. Any previous mention of CP on here was met with 'yes we damn well should have CP as an option'. As if we didn't have enough rights. Bit if a slap in the face for those that never used to.

'can posters please, please, please stop talking about 'upgrading' CPs to Marriages'

Well said. If you see a CP as in some way inferior to marriage, well that's your problem.

Lotta the point is that many of the LGBT community DO see the CP as less than marriage, as we were denied marriage for so long. I have explained as much upthread

My friends who are in a same sex relationship felt their civil partnership was less than marriage, hence why they got married as soon as they could.

Also why on earth do people still continue to spread crap mpabojt marriage? “You habe to promise your self to your husband” etc

Well funnily enough I got married not long ago and I didn’t promise to obey my husband or give myself to him. In fact now I think of it I’ve neve been to a marriage where the couple have those vows. We wrote our own vows. And both my parents are named on my marriage certificate.

I think if your DP refuses to marry you, a CP won’t change that. If you are against marriage because of its origins, how can you be okay to have another contract that has homophobic origins? Or does it not matter that it does because it didn’t apply to heterosexual couples?

crap about marriage and have to.

Need coffee

If you see a CP as in some way inferior to marriage, well that's your problem.

Guess the gay rights lobby had a huge problem, then. Luckily, it solved it by continuing to campaign for equal marriage rights and not just sucking it up like good gay people should do.

Also why on earth do people still continue to spread crap about marriage?

Sometimes, because they're ill informed, don't know what marriage is and don't realise that you don't have to say anything religious or make any vows at all. All you have to do, legally, is declare that you know no lawful impediment to the marriage and that you take the other person to be your lawfully wedded husband or wife. (They are legal terms with specific meanings, people need to stop loading them with shite that they don't possess in any legal term or, indeed, in the mind of any right thinking person.)

Often, because they do actually know what marriage is and want people to think they've got a different reason for refusing to do it. Frequently, the partners of such people will swallow this bollocks and repeat it because, again, it's more palatable than the idea that their partner simply won't marry them.

For the gay community a CP was inferior to marriage because gay marriage was illegal. CP was given to them as a consolation for them not being able to be married, not because they might not want to be.

Now that CP is potentially going to be legal for opposite sex couples the legal standing is the same.

I actualy find it hilarious the number of people who seem to think that because it’s called. Civil partnership rather than a marriage that it’s not the same thing now.

@AynRandTheObjectivist
Abolishing CP would have caused a major clusterfuck as all the CP-ed same sex couples would now suddenly find themselves no longer legally committed and have to go get married. It does make more sense just to extend it to everyone.

The law doesn't usually work like this.
To abolish the CP would be very straightforward. Any that are already entered into stand. You just stop new ones taking place. No need to cause a clusterfuck, they wouldn't just dissolve all the partnerships.
New laws pretty much always involve a transitional period and it is common practice to allow one.
I used to work in benefits and a lot of work in law goes into how umpteen different scenarios will be affected by the changes. This is the case for law changes relating to any topic.

If civil partnerships are so "pointless", why do a large minority of gay couples still opt for them in place of marriage?

From the Office for National Statistics:

The number of civil partnerships formed increased in 2017
This is the second year that civil partnership formations have increased since the introduction of marriages of same-sex couples was announced in December 2013. There were 908 civil partnerships formed in England and Wales in 2017, a rise of 2.0% compared with 890 in 2016 (Figure 1). However, civil partnership formation numbers in 2017 were around one-sixth of what they were in 2013 before the introduction of marriages of same-sex couples in March 2014.

It's not ok to disenfranchise these people by abolishing CPs, as some people in this thread have suggested.

Well said. If you see a CP as in some way inferior to marriage, well that's your problem.

So why did the Tories invent a specific form of legal union specifically for the gay community, who had always been lobbying for marriage equality?

Why did they remove acknowledgement of a sexual relationship to this new civil union, created specifically for the gay community? Purely accidental I suppose that the homophobes opposed any recognition of same sex legal union, and that when CP was created specifically for same sex couples, who never lobbied for 'special gay non - marriage', the sexual aspect was removed from CP

But it's clearly ridiculous for any LGBT person (or ally) to perceive CP as in some way inferior to marriage

If CP wasn't originally created as inferior to marriage:

• why was it created at all, why wasn't marriage law simply changed to extend rights to same sex couples couples?

• if it wasn't inferior to marriage, why wasn't it made available to opposite sex couples as well from the outset?

There is nothing the patriarchy would love more than for women to carry on taking the financial hit and doing the bulk of housework and childcare, with no legal recognition or protection. I don't understand - literally cannot fathom - how anyone can put themselves in this position and then turn around and say they're sticking it to the patriarchy.

I see a lot of posters on this thread saying that marriage is outdated and out of touch, but when asked for their solution, it is often "be richer", which doesn't strike me as a feasible alternative.

100% to all of this. Marriage certainly has patriarchal connotations, and CP homophobic. But the unwillingness to engage in any critical thinking about how well widespread cohabitation without marriage does the work of the patriarchy for it is mystifying (well it's not mystifying but it is stupid). There's no evidence that women who live with a man do things any differently wrt to housework etc, the only difference is the legal status. Now for some women this is more advantageous, but given that we're the poorer ones and the ones who society expects to do the caring, it's not a majority. I'd never judge any woman for choosing which of marriage, cohabitation and now CP suits her best, but one can do that without making arguments that are abject nonsense.

Also, some of you need to understand that CP felt second class to many people wanting same sex unions because it was created to prevent what was really wanted, marriage. Separate but equal doesn't have a very positive history. There has been far too much heterosexplanation of this already.

Agree PaulDacre. This seems to weaken by creating more options rather than simplifying the transferring legal rights to a partnership.

It's still a bit of paper. Off the 3.3m couples how many people will take it up. Also I wonder how many believe it is transferred automatically.

It's somewhat disingenuous to describe fewer than 1,000 coupes a year as a "significant minority" or to assume that if civil partnerships didn't exist they wouldn't have got married instead.

I don't know why I'm surprised that instead of binning civil partnerships they're being extended to heterosexual couples; it seems that when there's a choice between common sense and fuckwittery, the latter inevitably gets chosen.

We could be here all day debating what amounts to a significant minority, but three figures a year really isn't a lot. I knew the large majority of same sex couples were now choosing marriage but I confess I hadn't looked up the figures, and I didn't realise the numbers were so few. Interesting bit of information actually.

Also, I suspect the fact that one can convert a CP to a marriage but not the other way round has some influence on people's views that it's an upgrade. If we really considered the two to be even, it would be doable the other way round. There are probably more than zero straight married couples who'd have had a CP if that were on offer, after all.

It's somewhat disingenuous to describe fewer than 1,000 coupes a year as a "significant minority" or to assume that if civil partnerships didn't exist they wouldn't have got married instead.

Why is it disingenuous? It's a minority but quite a large one. For every 5-6 marriages between same-sex couples, there's 1 new civil partnership. That's in England and Wales (not NI), where both marriage and CP options are available, and the proportion appears to be staying pretty stable year on year.

Lots of same-sex couples choose to get a CP rather than get married. For whatever reason. And if it's ok for gay couples to have their reasons to choose CP over marriage, then it's ok for straight couples to have their reasons to do the same.