A key part of our enquiry into the lives of young same-sex couples focused on the question of money management. In this chapter we explore whether practices and meanings of money appear to be differ­ent to understandings derived from studies of heterosexual relation­ships. The question of money management has been a significant one in studies […]

Given that civil partnership was a relatively new possibility when our young partners entered into it, in principle there is no reason why it should be automatically seen as marriage or as a form of marriage. The fact that most of our interviewees saw it in this way, and entered into it in this spirit, […]

Berger and Kellner (1964: 9) note that in marrying, partners embark ‘on the often difficult task of constructing for themselves the little world in which they will live’. The fact that most of the younger same-sex part­ners had already begun this task before entry into civil partnership in part undermines the ‘cataclysmic connotation’ (ibid) that […]

Most partners had not imagined entering into a formalised same-sex relationship or marriage before their current relationship. While several women had had previous committed couple relationships with men, and some had children in this context, only one had married a man in the past. Neil recounted that he had once dreamt of a life with […]

While Berger and Kellner’s idea that marriage is a transition where ‘two strangers come together and redefine themselves’ may once have seemed unproblematic, today, when it is common for couples to have lived together (often for a relatively long time) before marriage, this statement seems rather antiquated. Marriage nowadays can involve couples who have a […]

In their classic essay on marriage in modern Western societies, Berger and Kellner (1964) link marriage to ontological or biographical order, stating that it creates for the individual a ‘sort of order’ in which they ‘can experience his life as making sense’ (1964: 1). They suggest that individuals invest in the ‘private world’ because of […]

Given the emphasis that many of our couples placed on the ordinary, and the enduring nature of the relating ideals and values that they had grown up with, as discussed in Chapter 3, it is perhaps unsurprising that they should choose to ‘marry’. However, while the majority of partners saw their entry into civil partnership […]

As discussed earlier, in previous studies of lesbian and gay selves and relationships, ‘coming out’ has been linked to radical biographical disruption and reconstruction. For example, Davies (1992) argues that coming out involves social relocation: different places, different social networks, and different social and sexual contexts. He argues that through coming out the person becomes […]

On the basis of their study of same-sex intimacies in the 1990s, Weeks et al. (2001: 50) noted (as did numerous other studies) that friendship ‘is key to understanding non-heterosexual ways of life’. It was the most important recurring theme among the 98 narrators in their study (of whom at least 70 were partnered) and […]

In contrast to the ideals of love, care and acceptance often associated with ‘the family’, feminist and queer critics have since the 1960s high­lighted its ‘dark side’. As Voller has suggested, ‘Nowhere has the hostil­ity to homosexuality been more frightening to large numbers of gay men and lesbians than in their own families, forcing them […]