‘It's Made a Huge Difference’: Recognition, Rights and the Personal Significance of Civil Partnership

In this paper we map briefly some of the arguments around the meaning and significance of the introduction of Civil Partnership in England and Wales, and in this way show how contested these meanings are with some groups profoundly against this legal reform and others supporting it, but for a mixture of reasons. We then turn to our empirical data based on interviews with same-sex couples to explore the extent to which these arguments and issues are part of the everyday decision making processes of same sex couples who have decided to register their partnerships or to undergo a commitment ceremony of some kind. In doing this, we were interested in how people make their own meanings (if they do) and whether they actually frame important decisions in their lives around the ideas that are part of the current political debates. We are interested in whether the public debates (such as legal equality) are featured in the accounts of our interviewees but we are also concerned to reveal whether other issues are important to same sex couples when they decide to have their relationship publicly recognised in some way. We found for example that while equality and legal rights were important, love, commitment and respect from wider family featured just as strongly in people's accounts.