“Let's Talk about the Institution”: Same‐Sex Common‐Law Partners Negotiating Marriage Equality and Relationship Legitimacy

Abstract

The 2005 Canada-wide legalization of same-sex marriage provided same-sex couples with access to an institution they had previous been excluded from. Yet not all couples choose to marry. In this paper, we examine why this is the case, considering the role of personal, political, and historical factors. We draw on 22 interviews with people in common-law same-sex relationships in Toronto to examine how they understand their relationship within the new context of marriage equality. We find that participants feel they are held accountable to marriage as a default relationship legitimacy norm, indicating that this new institutional access is accompanied by a set of social expectations. Despite their awareness of the need to navigate a social context favoring marriage, participants individualize their relationship decisions as personal rather than political. Participants often contradict themselves as they articulate what marriage means to them, suggesting that, in this period of legal and social transition, people are negotiating multiple meanings, societal messages, and traditions when it comes to making sense of their relationship. We discuss the implications of these findings for LGBQ activism and the framing of sexuality-based inequalities in Canadian society.

LGBTQ+ Aging Research in Canada: A 30-Year Scoping Review of the Literature

“…Participants described the complexities of incorporating the idea of marriage into something that a LGB person can do into their psyche and deliberately planning part of their wedding to include features related to their sexual orientation. Similar to Humble's [78] findings, Lyon and Frohard-Dourlent [79] explored the experience of same-sex common law partners; in their study, the authors found that for those who opted not to marry did so in in part due to the fact that it was previously illegal and inaccessible to them and it was still associated with heterosexuality.…”

“Making do with things we cannot change”: An interpretive phenomenological analysis of relationship resilience among gay men in Singapore

“…Otherwise, such individuals are often perceived as bringing dishonour to their families by rejecting expected social roles and violating the traditional cultural norms of putting the needs of others before their own (Ohnishi et al, 2006). The inability to garner acceptance and support from their social networks impacts the ways in which same-sex couples access emotional and instrumental support (Lau, 2012;Lyon & Frohard-Dourlent, 2015;Reczek, 2015). This lack of support systems, in turn, increases the RELATIONSHIP RESILIENCE AMONG GAY MEN IN SINGAPORE 6 likelihood of relationship dissolution as couples can neither cope with nor overcome the challenges in their relationships (Connolly, 2005;Graham & Barnow, 2013).…”