Gay couples shunning marriage: Only one in eight who are in a civil partnership have gone on to wed

Jan 14, 2016 by Jill

by Steve Doughty, Mailonline:

Gay couples have not greeted same-sex marriage as an important breakthrough, Oxford research suggests.

It said that same-sex marriage, hailed by David Cameron as one of his proudest achievements, has had much less impact than the introduction of civil partnerships a decade earlier.

Researcher John Haskey said that numbers of people who chose same-sex weddings after March 2014, when same-sex marriage was first introduced, have shown a ‘slow start’.

He said: ‘It was civil partnerships which were the more important breakthrough for same-sex couples, rather than same-sex marriages, at least from a numerical point of view.

‘Couples may have seen no need to hurry, if at all, to avail themselves of same-sex marriage, especially if they had already formed a civil partnership.’

Mr Haskey, a researcher at Oxford University’s Department of Social Policy and a former head of family figures at the Office for National Statistics, said the lack of interest in marriage among same-sex couples was ‘borne out by the fact that, roughly, only about one in eight civil partnership couples has so far converted their civil partnership into marriage’.

Read here