Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for generously funding the research on which this book is based. The project was based at the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life, in Sociology at the University of Manchester, and we thank our colleagues for their support. Lisa Jenkins administered the project, and we are especially grateful to her and to Hazel Burke and Victoria Higham. We are also grateful to the members of our research — user and advisory group including Meg Barker, Susan Botcherby, Scott Cuthbertson, Samantha Days, Petra Nordqvist, Martin Mitchell and Paul Simpson. We would like to thank Jeffrey Weeks for his interest in the project, and are grateful to Wendy Bottero for her comments on an early draft of the book. We would also like to thank the many academics and research users who listened to our presentations and helped us think through our findings, and the young LGBTI support groups and other organisations that talked to us about the research. We are indebted to the registrars across Britain, who generously helped us to recruit our interviewees, and we are especially grateful to Paul Parr, Deputy Registrar General, GROS, whose advice and help in recruiting was invaluable. Most importantly, we want to thank the partners who took part in the research and who generously gave their time to the study. We dedicate the book to them.