Equal Love

image from equallove.org.uk

Marriage law in the UK at the moment is in a funny in between stage of progress; same sex couples can be legally joined but in a separate institution to heterosexual couples. Separate but equal isn't really equal to me, and some people who feel the same are currently pursuing a case in the European courts to open both institutions to both same sex and heterosexual couples. A couple of days ago a story also broke that the government were soon to announce some reforms to marriage law, no announcement's been made yet but it sounds promising.

Anyway, recently it seems like some progress has been made, so fingers crossed things will move forward. But a few months ago Arthur and I had to reach a decision about whether we could reconcile getting married given that some people are excluded from the institution... and it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. We eventually decided that we wanted to be joined legally, even if it wasn't in the open fair institution we wanted, and even though there was something a little bit painful in propping up a system that we disagree with. Because it was such a hard decision to make, and because our feelings about it will colour our wedding, we decided to explain our feelings and our decision to our guests on our wedding website. Somehow it just felt better for everyone to understand why we might not be quite as joyful as we'd like on our wedding day. Here's our manifesto:

Our Ceremony

We will be holding our marriage ceremony in the garden, having signed our marriage into being earlier in the day at the local register office. There are a some practical reasons why we are not holding the legal marriage ceremony as part of the celebrations. Firstly, the register office is far too small to fit all of our lovely family and friends into. Secondly, we want to hold our ceremony in the open air, and to be able to plant a tree as part of this.

Our choice to separate the legal marriage from our celebrations is also one based on our feelings towards marriage law in this country.

There is currently a bid going through the European courts to open both Civil Marriage to same sex couples and Civil Partnership to heterosexual couples. As supporters of this campaign, the Equal Love campaign, we don’t feel a register office is an appropriate place of celebration for us. This feeling is compounded by the signage which must currently be displayed in all register offices by law. Personally we would prefer a Civil Partnership to a Civil Marriage as we feel this better reflects the way we see our relationship.

The main difference between Civil Marriage and Civil Partnership is in the name and the wording of the ceremony, and we’re not entirely comfortable with the wording of the Civil Marriage ceremony. We thought long and hard about whether we could happily get married with these things considered, and it was a difficult decision to make. In the end we came to the conclusion that only a ‘marriage’ ceremony conducted in our own words would be an appropriate celebration of our love and commitment. We also decided that as we cannot know how long it will be until Civil Partnership is available to us we’d rather be legally joined as husband and wife than not at all.

This ceremony in our own words is the ceremony we have chosen to share with you, our community of family and friends. Your support is important to our partnership, and it’s your presence when we state our vows to each other which will seal the commitments we make. We hope you’ll be as happy to be part of this ceremony as we are to share it with you.

It's funny how just sharing how we feel rather than keeping it under wraps makes everything feel a bit better. It's possible that when this announcement comes out we'll find a civil partnership will be an option soon, and that would be great, but if not I feel much happier knowing people understand what this marriage means to us.