Re. Marriage - I'm all for it!  It worked beautifully for me for 24 years and we could have both happily gone for the same again had evil fate not intervened.  Also, where there are children there are more legal safety measures for them in place at this moment in time should the marriage not survive.  I accept that the laws will have to change due to the change in circumstances nowadays and so many couples with children opting to just live together - but changes in that regard are slow.

I agree with Mary about the actual wedding though.  Ours was at 9.00 a.m. one morning in the local Registry Office.  Out of there by 9.30 - home, breakfast buffet provided by me and my father had made a beautiful wedding cake.  Just 20 of our friends were invited.  All done very inexpensively.

Both my sons have opted for expensive traditional weddings and one is divorced already after only four years.  I was coerced into paying for that because her family couldn't.  The other one didn't tell me what his wedding cost in the end and I dread to think, because he took over a very expensive hotel in the Lake District for 24 hours and invited all work colleagues as well as family - over 100 people, put most of them up there and in nearby hotels.  I paid some towards the whole thing as my contribution but it must have cost him an absolute fortune! Then there was the honeymoon too......

We couldn't at the time have afforded any thing like those examples but we couldn't have been happier.

It seems remarkably silly to me to spend all that on one day especially with houses costing more, mortgages etc.  Far better to put the money towards more practical things.

You can't tell them though can you Mary? 

Perversely, I wouldn't do it again precisely because of the legal ramifications.  I had the best anyway, that could never be repeated.  There'd be no point doing it again.  However I've just lost a boyfriend of over 4 years standing by saying just that.  Good job I couldn't give a monkeys... .  There would be all sorts of issues to consider now i.e. inheritances etc.  I just couldn't be "a**ed" drawing up legal contracts to try and fulfil every eventuality.  Just not worth it.

There are plenty more fish in the sea...

A male chum of mine is vehemently opposed to marriage in any way, shape or form. His feeling is that the original concept was merely a device for the advantage of the aristocracy to feather their nests by way of the woman`s dowry. He believes that Common Law Marriage is sufficient. Trouble is, it offers no rights or protection should either partner die, even if there is a Will. That can be contested by the family of the late partner who, as far as I know, are held to have first call, as it were.  All a bloody shambles really.

I think these things move with the times, although it's interesting that we've come back round to big marriages, which seems to have happened as the confluence of commercialism (you prove something's important by spending more money on it) with the return to fashion of religion (again, paradoxically, under the auspices of a secular individualism: you can't argue with my right to want a religious wedding ... although it's interesting that religious weddings seem to be much more in fashion than religious funerals).

My parents got married in 1968 at the ages of 20 and 21, in a small register-office ceremony, no honeymoon, moved into a tiny house, put all their spare money into the mortgage until they could afford to have me and my sister and move into a bigger house 13 years later. They've got a bit more money to spare now, entirely because my dad's worked very hard non-stop since leaving school at 16, and I think they're quite happy to be spending some of that money on my sister's slightly bigger church wedding, although we're not the sort of family to be extravagant about anything really, plus the religious side comes from my sister's future in-laws.

I'm very glad that gay people at last have more or less equal rights to register a partnership recognised in law, although I'd be even happier if there were better and clearer legal safeguards set up for people (whether gay or straight, or, as in the recent legal case, unmarried sisters for example) who prefer to live together in a private sharing arrangement without choosing to declare their relationship to the world.

I am very glad to have a civil partnership.  I am not in the least bothered that's its not called a marriage: I understand that a marriage, as opposed to a partnership, requires sexual consummation to be valid and sexual fidelity.  We can practice the second without it being a legal requirement, and as for the first, contrary to what some straights seem to think, it is rather tricky to define (particularly in the case of two women.)

It is a big pity that it is thought a church wedding should be a "big event".  When I was younger, all the clergy I knew were satirical about the "big days" when they were meant to act as a spear-carrier.

A church wedding can be intimate, as long as there are witnesses.  The "big wedding" seems to be a Victorian invention: certainly the bride's dress is a ritualisation of a Victorian woman's best dress.  In the V & A there are a number of good dresses which were used as wedding dresses and then used as evening dresses afterwards.

After our civil partnership, we arranged for a blessing.  This took place during the course of the ordinary Sunday service at my partner's then church.  After communion, we knelt before the priest for a blessing, adapted by me from an official Church of England prayer for a marriage after a civil ceremony.  (My adaption was to refer to the festival of the day and to our sacramental communion.  I would have omitted references to child-bearing.)

We paid for a trio to sing the Byrd Three Part Mass for the service.

Excepting that it is a decision made between two consenting adults.  Or that, though each can decide to opt-in, the union itself is some sort of emergent decisionesque phenomenon agreement.

I can't say I much understand myself.  Must be another one of these unadvertised withdrawal symptoms, that proffering of obliquely-phrased opinions on the importance of personal choice in civil unions.