Arwa Mahdawi (G2, 20 November) is right that a marriage certificate requires the fathers’ names, while a civil partnership certificate requires both parents’ names, and it’s high time this was changed. But other than that, there is no perceptible difference between a civil partnership and a civil (ie non-religious) marriage. The rules for the ceremony are the same, and the requirements (and forms) for dissolution of the marriage or partnership are the same. What couples make of the ceremony or the partnership varies enormously. When a couple in a civil partnership decides to marry, they have the same choice of venue, and use the same format, as they did in their civil partnership. It seems like an issue over language.
Judith Fage
London
• I read with interest Gaby Hinsliff’s article (Don’t mock the Redknapps – living apart together can save a marriage, 17 November). Her argument for a married life that allows, through a degree of separation, “the ability to stretch out in life a little, to remember how it feels together”, was anticipated bluntly in 1878 by Friedrich Nietzsche (aphorism 393, in Human, All Too Human): “If spouses did not live together, good marriages would be more frequent.” In fact, Nietzsche has much else to say in this book that seems supportive of this position – for instance, that “A marriage is proved good by its being able to tolerate an ‘exception’”, and, perhaps most important of all, that a lasting marriage must sustain a lifelong conversation. All else is transitory: one assesses the potential of a good match crucially by asking “do you think you will be able to have a conversation with this woman right into old age?” (and, to update the philosopher, “with this man?”).
Bob Connell
Amberley, West Sussex
• The headline on Arwa Mahdawi’s piece, “Marriage is about power, property and control”, doesn’t describe my marriage or, I suspect, that of many others. I was married in 1970, look back on a mutually rewarding 47 years, and hope for many more years of the same. Marriage is what you make it. If you don’t want it to be about power, property and control then don’t marry someone who thinks it is.
John Carter
London
• I am sorry to see that Arwa Mahdawi has fallen into the error of assuming that what applies in England applies to the whole UK. My Scottish marriage certificate, duly registered in Dundee on 7 April, 1964, includes the full names of both my mother and my mother-in-law as well as those of our fathers.
Janette Hetherington
Nottingham
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