Return of the Shotgun Wedding

Gay couples are to be given a legal status that brings them close to married couples, in one of the most encouraging signs of our changing society to be seen for some time. The civil partnerships bill, announced in the Queen's speech on Wednesday, will give homosexual lovers who have registered their partnership some of the standard rights that married couples take for granted. They are pretty unromantic rights, but still, not to be sniffed at - things like a share of a partner's pension or the waiving of inheritance tax when one partner dies.

This decision to give homosexual lovers a marriage in all but name shows how politicians have become ready to accept a change in society that they didn't do anything to encourage - but were no longer prepared to hinder. But given this matter-of-fact acceptance of social change, why are politicians still standing out against giving heterosexual lovers similar rights?

Unmarried heterosexual couples are legally second class, even third class. No matter how long they have lived together, how deep their love, how many children they have, how entwined their property, on death or break-up they still run up against a legal system that puts people who have trotted to the register office or the church in a different league. And that makes no sense - because unmarried lovers themselves just don't see their partnerships as second or third class.

Much popular culture still puts the pursuit of marriage as the great goal of all partnerships. Unmarried celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow or Kate Moss are constantly being bugged to reveal their wedding dates, however clearly they state that they don't have marriage on their minds. But despite the assumption that all a girl wants is a Cinderella dress and a great big cake, for many people a wedding strikes the wrong note. It's hard for the voices of those couples who prefer not being married to be heard, because it sounds as if we are just trying to celebrate a negative. But the decision not to get married is often a positive choice - a decision to make mutual passion into the basis for a shared life, rather than looking for a helping hand from musty traditions.

Apart from their desire not to squeeze their love into badly fitting ceremonies, unmarried couples do not necessarily feel any different from married ones. I've just been reading some new research from Oxford University by Mavis Maclean and John Eekelaar on how couples view their obligations to one another, and it shows how married and unmarried couples tend to speak the same language. You can't tell from the quotes whether it is an unmarried or a married couple speaking. "I'm one half of a whole", "What's mine is hers", say the cohabitants.

Indeed, married and unmarried couples tend to be so alike that unmarried lovers, more often than not, subscribe to a myth that seems to them to make complete sense - the myth of common-law marriage. It is fiction, the idea that if you live with somebody long enough you turn into their spouse in the eyes of the law; yet a recent survey found that more than half of cohabiting individuals believed it.

Given that in countries such as New Zealand and Canada the rights of cohabitants are recognised in law, the most sensible thing for politicians to do would be to turn this fiction into reality. They could formulate a law that would honour the commitment people make towards one another once they have made a home together over some time, and especially once they have had children.

It's a sensible, pragmatic idea that would address injustices in sorting out property after death or break-ups, and would go further, in suggesting that families don't all have to jump through the same hoops to be respected. But the government has listened too long to the siren voices epitomised by Daily Mail columnists, who argue that marriage must be promoted because it confers stability on relationships. This is a shaky assumption - if you could compare like with like, screening out the people who knew that they weren't in it for the long term, comparing unmarried couples who felt a true commitment to one another with married couples, you wouldn't necessarily see that married partnerships last longer. As Eekelaar told me: "It is hard to see that marriage still constitutes a significant source of personal obligation." If you don't already have it, you aren't going to get it from the vicar and the cake.

But these siren voices have encouraged the government not to support the unmarried relationship as a potential source of love, stability and commitment, but instead to campaign to dispel the myth of the common-law marriage. This should, says a spokesman, "empower" couples to make "informed" choices. And, yes, once unmarried lovers realise more clearly that they don't have the rights that married people have, more of them may indeed get married. But how impressive would that be? A ceremony based on fear of poverty; an institution bolstered by financial advantage - is that the best basis for a loving relationship?