I was so, so, sorely tempted to pinch Giles Fraser’s brilliant headline in The Guardian yesterday – ‘The politics of shit and semen‘. Kudos to the Guardian for even allowing the headline!

Giles was talking about the inability of #occupylsx to clear up their own mess in one square mile even whilst loudly pontificating on their credentials for clearing up the mess the entire country is in, but it would have been just as appropriate for this post.

I may have discovered an unexpected fringe benefit that might bring me in full support of Gay marriage. Settle down for a shirt up lifting tale.

Wending its way through the civil courts at the moment, is a most uncivilised ‘divorce’ between two ‘civil’ partners. Peter Lawrence and Donald Gallagher. Sadly, their civil partnership broke down after a mere 7 months, albeit that they had been in some sort of a relationship for 11 years.

Mr Lawrence was a city analyst with the high income that brings. Mr Gallagher had acted a part in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but apart from that had spent most of his time in their home playing Queen of the Dessert.

Mr Gallagher brought into the civil partnership some £40,000 he had either accumulated in his previous sporadic acting ‘career’ or from previous relationships, we know not which. Mr Lawrence, by comparison, had cash and assets amounting to several million pounds.

No fault divorce was an excellent idea – and I say that as someone who got caught on the wrong end of it, and ended up handing several hundred thousand pounds to someone I had barely seen in the previous 20 years – but on the basis that the equal division of assets was fair on the ending of most marriages, which required support for the children of that marriage, and generally required recognition that most wives give up their career to raise children, I supported it through gritted teeth. Far better that there should be a few ‘unfair’ cases than that the majority of cases should drag through the courts for years.

If it had been possible to amend that law so that where there were no children, there was no equal division of assets, on the basis that you were both perfectly healthy adults capable of supporting yourself, then I would have been in total agreement. A childless marriage was and is relatively rare. A marriage where it is the wife who earns the money rarer still. The faint whinny of complaint from those of us on the sharp end of this ‘equal division’ of assets were never likely to make ourselves heard.

However, a new and more powerful voice, one that has spent years honing itself to screeching point, is about to enter the fray.

The howl of outrage of a wealthy partner forced to hand over £1.7 million quid to a man who has been sharing his bed for seven months.

The justification for the original settlement was that Mr Gallagher was entitled to continue ‘to live in the manner to which he has become accustomed’ – and required £28,000 a year for life in order to do so. Many an embittered husband or wife will sympathise with Mr Lawrence. I certainly do – why should someone continue to be supported for the rest of their life in the manner they have enjoyed for a few months? Children, yes. Inevitably that includes those who care for them living at a similar level.

The appeal court are now reserving judgment on Mr Lawrence’s offer of a lump sum of £620,000, which still seems excessive.

Gay marriage will inevitably increase the number of childless marriages that break down – and may well bring a call for a rethink of the equal division of assets and pensions when two healthy adults share their life for a short period and then decide to move on. Neither Marriage nor Civil Partnership should be a reason for someone who has chosen (ie not forced upon them by child rearing) to spend their time during the relationship – I quote – “helping create and maintain a lovely home in the flat in various ways, soft furnishings, planting on balconies, improvement of layout and fixtures, redecoration.”

Re-potting the Dahlias is not a good enough reason to be kept for the rest of your life.

uk Fred
March 10, 2012 at 10:33

I thought that this case puts a new meaning to the phrase “drama queen”

Spiral Architect
March 10, 2012 at 04:03

Anyone remember The Sun’s headline when Elton John and Furnish concluded a civil marriage?

‘Elton Takes David Up The Aisle’!

Genius.

john malpas
March 10, 2012 at 00:06

And what will happen when gays demand and get a right to children – either by allocation or other such activity.
After all there are plenty spare children
and the state has control of a lot of them.

Mark
March 9, 2012 at 17:01

It will be very interestign to see how the law evolves over the next few years to cope with this. I am sure that if the norms for divorce for same-sex childless couples turn out to be different from those for heterosexual couples, the effects will spread.

I will be good to see some logic applied to this difficult situation. Meanwhile I’m sure Mr McCartney is being careful.

Hexe Froschbein
March 9, 2012 at 16:19

Hmm, I think you’re missing the actual core of the issue here, you’re looking at the crap results of a crap solution and want the resulting crap improved to something somewhat more sane, but end up thinking of how you can re-arrange the turd into the shape of a chocolate cake which you plan to divide fairly, just so it makes it easier to swallow the actual sh1t pill that’s on the menu for the participants.

When you marry or otherwise commit to a life partner, no matter what the law says, it always is an ‘all-in’ move.

Your spouse is the person you bond with (in love or hate, whatever you choose), and the amount of times you can bond with someone deeply like that is very limited, people’s personalities do not have a reset button, they are one-time pads and everything you do will always stay with you here, you’ll never get back to how you were before, those years and feelings can’t be refunded, you will not be made whole, just like youth never returns after you grow up. So even if you can divorce on paper and get fleeced of all your money and renounce your children (or have the SS do that for you…), you’ll never be ‘free’ again.

So, in essence, ‘divorce’ does not actually exist, other than as a get-rich-quick scheme for the legal profession.

Curiously so, not marrying your life partner and then splitting up may save or cost you some money, but it still has the same effect in real terms: a messed up life you have to bootstrap from zilch and scars on your personality that are permanent.

Divorce gives people the illusion that they could do better elsewhere, which is why a lot of people don’t try as hard as is needed for a marriage to work, which in turn makes divorce far more likely. It also makes people hastily choose unsuitable partners with the idea to ‘try them out and discard’ if it goes awry (never a recipe for success…)

Choice of life partner is a difficult issue, and people who are careless about it end up in trouble no matter what legal arrangements you put in place — if you banned marriage, the result would still be as horrible (and it is, look at the army of ‘patchwork families’ and single moms who were never married)

Ironically most people would get on with almost anyone(after the initial oxytocin bonding fest) if they both tried to get along and made the best of each other (because that is how love grows and works) — alas, most people are not ‘special and individual’ but just difficult because they want to be(and can, and because many people no longer reach emotional adult maturity either…). And the older they get, the more specific they get about ‘their needs’ and the more ‘allergies’ they pick up in various failed relationships, which makes finding a new bond that holds even harder, and that is before we even consider that a pair bond takes years to develop properly to a fulfilling dimension — time most people no longer have, due to their age (hordes of ‘desperately seeking but never finding’ 1968′s hippy generation singles in their 50′s and 60′s (and 70′s) are a sad monument to this — it’s quite a ‘free love’ frog pond out there, lol).

So, to simplify this mess, marriage should be a once-a-lifetime privelidge, making divorce obsolete, since it does not solve the actual problem but generates more trouble than we had before it ever was made legal(and I’m not disputing it wasn’t bad back then — yep, life is always bad when you mess is up, sadly so!)

David
March 9, 2012 at 13:45

One interesting question this case raises (and which is quite independent of the fact that this was a gay rather than hetero marriage) is whether the Courts should take account of periods of time in which the couple lived together before they got married.

This was apparently the break-up of an 11 year relationship, although they had only been married for 7 months. I imagine that the initial judgment was influenced by that.

All in all, an interesting case as you say. Let’s wait and see what the Court of Appeal makes of it.

Anna Raccoon
March 9, 2012 at 14:04

“I imagine that the initial judgment was influenced by that.”

Yet isn’t that exactly why Civil Marriage was introduced – the unfairness of division of assets when