Coming out as friends

Civil partnership is about more than erotic love, and gays could help to change society

by Mark Vernon, The Guardian, 28th October 2005

Civil partnerships do not yet exist: the first ceremonies will take place on 21st December. But already they are being forced into confetti-lined boxes embossed with the word marriage. Seizing the opportunity, in an otherwise declining market, the wedding industry is packaging up everything from "prenuptial" agreements to pink limos (get it!). But is this rush to the neon altar really what gay men and lesbians want and, as importantly, is it the best institution that civil partnerships can be?

There is a great risk that the answer to both these questions will turn out to be no - for reasons that have to do with the individual, the commercial and the philosophical. Talking to friends in same-sex relationships who are thinking about civil partnership, I sense a profound hesitancy. Gay men and women are still often wary of public declarations of affection; the tone of the debate may have changed beyond recognition since the 1980s, but there is wisdom in caution when the world opens its arms to your love. I suspect that many may sign the forms, just to make life (and death) easier, but they probably won"t ring the bells. Be you a lawyer, a teacher, a builder or a vicar, there is plenty of reason to keep tabs on who knows.

This unease may lessen if acceptance grows. However, there is further reason that people feel wary. Civil partnership does not just pose the question of how public you make your private life, but the extent to which you want it to be shaped by the market too. White tuxedos and meaning-laden vows may work in California, but the aesthetic is hard to pull off in Croydon. And this is not just a question of questionable taste, for at another level, it relates to the far more troubling relationship between the commercialization of intimacy and the decline in institutions of belonging, notably marriage.

Links between these two features of late capitalism are hard to specify for sure. But one cannot help but think that there is a confusion between price and value going on when a major factor in getting married is cost. You might think that civil partnerships, being hard won, would be resistant to such collapses of meaning, at least for a while. But no. One company, Pink Weddings, advertises itself saying: "Maybe you are both too busy with work or simply don't have the time to plan your wedding the way you would like." This is gay lib by credit card.

So what kind of relationship could civil partnerships be an expression of? The heart of the matter is, I think, that relationships between gay men and women are different from those between married couples. This has nothing to do with children, because clearly some same-sex partners have kids. Neither is it about an idea of complementarity found only in opposite sex couples. Rather, it is about social history and the way in which the personal is political. In marriage, this is still caught up with notions of possession, for all that many would have it otherwise. Witness the persistent nostalgia for acts like the father giving away the bride.

For gay couples there is little, if any, sense of this. For example, gay men and women routinely remain friends with former lovers in ways that would be thought dodgy, even treacherous, in the married world. Alternatively, I am much more likely to do something without my partner, like go on holiday, than my married friends are.

So what is the best model for civil partnerships? In a word, friendship. If erotic love is about having another and them having you, friendship is about knowing another and being known by them: close friends become "one soul in two bodies", as Montaigne put it, rather different from the nuptial notion of two bodies becoming one.

If this philosophy of friendship is right then it begs the question as to what ceremony is appropriate to express it. In the medieval period the church provided the answer, ironically enough: so-called sworn friendship was a religion vow, made during the mass. Clearly, the social recognition this afforded would not carry today. But the old practice stretches the imagination as to what is possible now.

This might not only benefit homosexuals. Consider again the contemporary decline in the institution of marriage. If people's ideal relationship today could be called sexual friendship, then it is notable that this is an element that is far from explicit in the older, possession-oriented, institution. If civil partnership ceremonies can resist looking like maudlin imitations of weddings, then they would show that friendship is worthy of public commitment. Contrary to what conservatives have said, they may even contribute to the reinvention of marriage.

Finally, it could be argued that to base civil partnership on friendship would be to push it back into the closet, since friendship is largely a private affair. However, friendship is itself coming out of the closet in our networked days and mobile lives. Civil partnerships could be an opportunity to shape, and not merely be shaped by, this trend in society too.