The BiReCon Files 5: How Civil Partners Meet

Another BiReCon video transcript for you. Anna Einarsdottir - How Civil Partners meet

Thank you very much Meg.

So actually this project is entitled "Just like marriage: a young couple civil partnership".  And I work side by side with Dr Graham (??) who unfortunately isn't here and Professor Carol Smart.  Now, we've been doing this project for the last two years and so I'm really really grateful for the opportunity to come here, I really appreciate that.

So my focus for today will primarily be about how civil partners meet.  What kind of stories people tell about this exciting part of the relationship
and then their intentions, what are their intentions when they start to set out.  What I must say is that they're not necessarily looking for a long-term relationship, it's more like just go and see,
how it, you know, take it with the flow kind of thing.

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Slightly different circumstances.  While most men meet online, women meet through their existing social network - through work, through friends, through church.

What about the process from casual dating to a relationship? Well to begin with the importance of transparency and honesty were stressed by many. Which included not playing games or getting into merry-go-round situations such as "I'm not texting you because she isn't" or "I've rung him so he must ring me" or "I will leave it for two days" or "she doesn't think I'm too keen".  You know, and perhaps this can be interpreted as a sign of how few if any dating rules apply to same-sex relationships as opposed to opposite-sex relationships.  And finally what I would like to say is something about how people transition from a relationship to a committed relationship. 

Now the future of a relationship is often determined by critical moments, such as hospitalisation, death in the family, or one party moving away.  It's the reaction that matters and how partners handle the situations, these difficult situations, which win people over largely because they feel they are cared for - but also to think that they are able to handle the responsibility of the future,  They don't run away or panic: in other words, for our participants, they become CP material.

 I found this one a really interesting talk in the gendered divide it highlighted - it was about LGB people rather than just bi in its research, looking at same-gendered couples, and so there was a lot the chimed with my own non-academic observations about the human geography of queer space and life.