They married for love but keep it quiet: Same sex partners in Iceland

Abstract

Iceland is one of a few countries where the recognition of same sex relationships has been practised since the 1990s. This article is based on a mixed method study among civil partners in Iceland and explains why people choose to marry. Whilst the questionnaire data signalled that most people marry for love, love marriages were difficult to explore in the face-to-face interaction, as was the multiple understandings of security. Claiming citizenship rights, in contrast, was generally framed as marrying for the ‘right’ reasons, readily articulated by everyone involved in this study. I argue that this hesitance may partly be explained by the campaign for same sex partnership itself, which promoted security discourses rather than emotional freedom, and consequently hindered the flow of love narratives.

Keywords

Equality discourses love marriages motives narratives same sex marriage

The feasibility of the ‘marriage licence’ (Holt, 2004; Merin, 2002; Phelan, 2001; Rothblum, 2005; Shulman et al., 2012; Stoddard, 1997; Sullivan, 2004; Sycamore, 2004; Warner, 2000) and what the outcome might bring for same sex couples (Browne, 2011; Richardson, 2000; Warner, 2000; Weeks, 2007; Weekset al., 2001) has been at the forefront of scholarly debate. With growing numbers of countries who offer same sex couples formal recognition of their relationships the scholarly landscape is beginning to change and now includes analysis of how such civil liberties have been achieved (Bech, 1992; Harding, 2011; Smith, 2010), demographic information about the ‘married population’ (Andersson et al., 2006; Carpenter and Gates, 2008; Solomon et al., 2004), interpretations of ‘wedding’ celebrations (Shipman and Smart, 2007; Smart, 2007; 2008) and how ‘marriage’ translates in everyday life (Browne, 2011; Einarsdóttir, 2011; Goodwin and Butler, 2009; Heaphy et al., 2013; Rothblum et al., 2011; Solomon et al., 2004). The interesting part of this development is that the fundamental question – Why do people marry?¹ – is largely overlooked (see however, Heaphy et al., 2013) or, as we have seen, replaced with the question of why some people choose not to (Rolfe and Peel, 2011). In some respects, the absence of the question of why people marry may signal how ‘self evident’ marriage is taken to be or how much faith has been placed in the impact of same sex partnership recognition, but it may also bear evidence of political resistance against marriage (Auchmuthy, 2004; see also Barker and Langdridge, 2006; Bevacqua, 2004; Sycamore, 2004; Warner, 2000), hence the question about refraining from marriage.

In this article I explore why same sex couples marry by relying on findings from a mixed method research in Iceland. My findings suggest that people marry for a range of reasons. Despite the significance of emotional reasons, however, these were not easily conveyed face to face. In part, this can be explained by the pragmatic and legalistic rationale for same sex marriage, which hindered the flow of love narratives, but it may also be an indication of the difficulties involved in moving from highly privatized practices of non-heterosexual intimacy towards more public declarations of relationship status. To demonstrate this, I focus on the three main reasons why women marry women: love, security and commitment. The survey and the interviews produced slightly different findings. Besides, disentangling personal reasons from the political arguments employed in the campaign was not always easy. I also found that some stories were readily conveyed, whereas others struggled to unfold. I begin this journey with the public story of same sex partnership recognition in Iceland, but first I outline the study.

The study

At the time of study,² moral debates over same sex marriage had settled in Iceland and people were managing everyday life as married couples. The study is based on extensive analysis of four different sources. Firstly, official documents and media coverage of the Act on Registered Partnership, secondly, a census of same sex civil unions in Iceland, and finally, interviews with professionals (activists, civil servants and politicians) who were involved in the legislative process and women who have entered into civil partnership.

The census data was generated with the help of Statistics Iceland: The Centre for Official Statistics, which holds records of all marriages and civil partnerships in the country. At the time of study, 128 civil partnerships had been recorded in Iceland.³ A questionnaire, including 76 multiple choice and open-ended questions, was posted to 216 individuals, 115 women and 101 men.⁴ Responses were received from 103 individuals,⁵ which brought the overall response rate to 47.7%. The vast majority of respondents were between the ages of 26 and 45 (68.9%). Women tended to be slightly younger than the men, their level of education was generally higher and they were more likely to be in paid employment, 89.8% versus 76.7% of men. Most respondents lived in Reykjavik and its surrounding areas, usually in their own property (89% vs. 10% living in rented accommodation and 1% with parents). 89.3% were Icelandic citizens, and only one in four had children in their care. Over 80% of the respondents were living in legal partnership at the time, 16.5% had separated or divorced and 4.9% had lost their partner.

Although the census data included information about men and women, I decided to focus on women in the interviews. In part, this can be explained by lack of resources, but fundamentally, this decision was made for personal and political reasons and to create a longitudinal angle to the study by revisiting women who had taken part in my previous research. A total of 18 women were recruited for participation by means of snowballing, criterion sampling and maximum variation sampling (Patton, 1990): 2 were contacted through a friend (snowballing), 5 participated in my undergraduate study and agreed to further involvement in this study (criterion sampling) and 11 had volunteered for participation through my questionnaire (maximum variation sampling). Despite such vigorous sampling procedures the group was fairly homogenous, a well-known limitation in research concerning the non-heterosexual population (Atkinson and Flint, 2001; Heaphy et al., 1998), but on this occasion, a reasonable reflection of Icelandic society. Of the 18 women, 14 were married, 3 had divorced and 1 had never married.⁶ The women were between the ages of 26 and 56. They were all white Europeans (16 Icelandic and 2 dual/non-Icelandic citizens) and the overwhelming majority were middle class. The women generally had a high level of education and most of them lived in the greater Reykjavik area (only four lived in the countryside). Their marriages spanned from three to nine years, three women had children from previous heterosexual relationships and one couple had adopted a child. As a group, they had raised six children who were between the ages of 5 and 28. All the couples cohabited throughout their marriage.

The total number of interviews came to 16. Some women were not in partnerships at the time, so were interviewed alone, while couples were interviewed either together or separately. Elsewhere I have discussed the merits of interviewing couples together and/or separately (Einarsdóttir, 2012; Heaphy and Einarsdóttir, 2013; Heaphy et al., 2013), but on this occasion it was generally left to the women’s discretion whether they wished to be interviewed jointly or not. Three couples were interviewed together and four were interviewed separately. Three women had divorced and were interviewed alone and one woman was single. The interviews were semi structured and focused on the following areas: background/family status, the legislation, entering into Civil Partnership and being in Civil Partnership. To explore these themes I relied on the following questions:

Why did you decide to enter into Civil Partnership?

How did it come about?

Did your partner enter into Civil Partnership for the same reasons?

Do you believe it is important to enter into Civil Partnership? If so why?

Within minutes from the start of every interview, the language had changed from Civil Partnership (used by myself) to being married (used by interviewees), which is interesting in itself, but not the focus here. To accommodate this, all my subsequent questions were based on the interviewees’ ‘chosen’ terminology.

To study how public stories may shape personal ones, I turned to Ken Plummer’s (1995) framework for Telling Sexual Stories. His framework helped me to understand why some stories are easier to tell than others, how stories are heard and under what conditions they may be told. The focus is therefore not only on the story itself, but the ‘complex social processes involved in the tellings’, or in other words, the context in which stories both take shape and are shaped by. A story, in Plummer’s terms needs to ‘find its time’. A ‘trouble’ has to be recognized, a language must be established, identities have to be created and allies need to be found in order to produce what he calls, a ‘culture of public problems’. Applying these principles to the situation in Iceland was productive, but not entirely problem free. The situation in Iceland is far more complex than Plummer’s articulation of generic process of storytelling suggests (Plummer, 1995), as a seamless progression of a storyteller finding a voice and a space filled with an understanding audience. In Iceland’s case, neither the voice nor the identity matched the story; in fact, two stories were played out simultaneously, instead of one. The official story concerned equality and rights, while the other one, highlighted visibility and recognition. Needless to say, the first story received far more attention. It was articulated by Members of Parliament and largely confirmed by the media, which produced a public discourse of same sex marriage. The informal story, in contrast, was either downplayed or silenced. This version was shared by non-heterosexual representatives in the legislative process, and later by those who are married, including my interviewees. I begin my discussion with the official celebration of the Act on Civil Partnership (‘Lög um staðfesta samvist’), before turning my attention to personal stories of marriage.

From a public story to private reasons

The culmination of the campaign for same sex marriage in Iceland was staged on 27 June 1996 with a public reception, hosted by the Mayor of Reykjavik to pay tribute to the first couples who married. This glamorous event was held in one of the city’s most prestigious modern theatres, where the President of Iceland, candidates in coming presidential elections, politicians, celebrities and selected pastors, celebrated along with friends and families of non-heterosexuals. Although this event was sponsored by the City of Reykjavik, Samtökin ‘78: The National Organization of Lesbians and Gay Men in Iceland was primarily responsible for the arrangement. Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, the acting president of Samtökin ‘78 at the time, described how they organized this reception.

We decided to make a big deal of it. Well you may say that we planned this strategically, who they [the couples] were and how this was all presented as a special wedding reception for these first two couples – the gay couple and the first lesbian couple.

They approached two couples from a list of partners that represented what they were looking for. The knock-on effect of this strategy was quite dramatic, but the reception did not quite go as planned. One of the couples the Organization had in mind was not ready for the publicity. Instead of presenting two mature couples in long-term stable relationships – drawing attention to issues of retirement, parenting, family ties, the role of next of kin and the effects of living with HIV – only one of them was finally involved. The couple who filled in advocated something entirely different from the public story of equality and citizenship played during the campaign in Iceland. In comparison with the mature couple, the public knew little if anything about this ‘young and gorgeous couple’ as Margrét referred to them. Moreover, the media did not highlight any of their personal circumstances either. Finding this couple a place within the public framework of same sex marriage was not easy, and the ‘nice contrast’ Margrét believed they represented, may have been love and passion, signalling the unexpected outcome of emotional freedom. This event was a success. The Organization was not only able to demonstrate the importance of same sex marriage in claiming citizenship, but the unforeseen twist of events, also opened doors for love marriages. In Plummer’s terms, a ‘culture of public problems’ (1995: 129) had been created where personal stories were told publicly surrounded by allies. The claim for same sex marriage had been made, same sex marriage had been warranted and the conditions for same sex marriage had been laid out publicly.

Although the events in Iceland preceded the academic debate about ‘partnership rights’, they certainly featured some elements of it, placing citizenship at the heart. How citizenship is constructed and consumed, and what outcome it might have for same sex couples, however, has been subjected to debate (see for instance Browne, 2011; Holt, 2004; Merin, 2002; Phelan, 2001; Richardson, 2000; Rothblum, 2005; Stoddard, 1997; Sullivan, 2004; Warner, 2000). In Iceland, a formal recognition of this kind was believed to be the key to bringing homophobia to an end. Overnight, lesbian and gay activists became national heroes for abolishing what was perceived as the ‘greatest injustice in the country’ as one Member of Parliament expressed it. The event marked the end of the public story, and the beginning of more personal stories, which I turn to next.

Motives for marriage

One of the census questions concerned motivations for marriage. Partners were asked to identify their three main reasons for marrying from a list of 17 possible answers: love, commitment, children, financial, inheritance, taxation, pension, social security, practical,⁷ symbolic, statement, LGBT rights, security, illness, religion, immigration, challenge heterosexual marriage, plus an open ended statement ‘other’. These items were designed to mirror scholarly debates over same sex partnership rights (and the campaign in Iceland), and to explore possible discrepancies between such public discourses and private reasons. The results showed that 92.6% of women (and 81.6% of men) identified love as the primary reasons for their marriage, followed by security (44.1% vs 23.3% men) and commitment (28.8% vs 14.0% of men). The next three reported reasons were inheritance (27.1%), symbolic value (22.15%) and LGBT rights (16.9%), but the remaining reasons: children, practical, taxation, financial, pension, statement, challenging heterosexual marriage and other, remained fairly insignificant. No women reported immigration, religion or social security as a reason. While my findings suggest that men and women marry for slightly different reasons (also known in the UK, see Heaphy et al., 2013), the point I wish to underline is that, love aside, the order of reasons for men (inheritance and LGBT rights), seemed more similar to the importance placed on citizenship and equality during the campaign for same sex partnership rights in Iceland, whereas the most reported reasons among women – love, security and commitment – did not fully correspond with it. On the contrary, their reasons suggest the emotional significance of publicly announcing their intimate life. Love and equality, however, are not mutually exclusive categories; they are both factors which may influence women’s decision to marry. These findings also suggest that marriage between women is not just a free-flowing contract based on individual choice (Bauman, 2003; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Giddens, 1992, 2003; Weeks et al., 2001), but it is also fashioned by tradition and the symbolic connotations of marriage (Evans, 2003; Jamieson, 1998, 2003; Lewis, 2001; Smart, 2005; Smart and Shipman, 2004). As we will see later, in my discussion about the interview findings, this crystallized in the reason ‘security’, which featured elements of ‘choice’ and ‘tradition’ (symbolic value of marriage) as partners attempted to manage risk in relationships. Finally, the census data shows that women in Iceland generally do not marry for political reasons, such as challenging the institution of marriage (Brandzel, 2005; Sycamore, 2004; Warner, 2000). Their reasons tend to have more personal significance, along with the prospect of recognition (Lewin, 2001, 2004; Liddle and Liddle, 2004; Shipman and Smart, 2007; Weeks, n.d.) as the response ‘symbolic’ suggests.

Marriage narratives

Although the census data provided a general overview of the reasons why people marry, the interviews enabled me to take a closer look at these reasons, by exploring how marriage reasons were generally narrated. On the whole, my interviewees were not always clear about their reasons for marrying, and in some cases, they did not have any. Their accounts were generally shaped by the equality discourses used in the campaign for same sex partnership recognition, stressing the importance of claiming citizenship, both to exercise their civil and human rights (see for example Barker and Langdridge, 2006; Sullivan, 2004) and as a way of showing solidarity with the LGBT movement. This raises questions about the prospects of alternative politics in small communities or whether those who do not marry are less likely to be activists. It also problematizes choice, and how freely activists can reject marriage, given that same sex marriage was never critiqued on behalf of the movement, at least not publicly in Iceland. My findings suggest that this may be problematic as 70.6% of those who have married also claim to be activists. In the following sections I discuss common threads from the interviews, by unpacking three of the principal reasons: love, security and commitment and how these motives were produced in conversation with public discourses of same sex marriage in Iceland, in front of a present (me) and imagined (you) audience.

Love

Given the prominence of ‘love’ in the census data, I naively assumed that the interviews would mirror this. I was wrong. The women generally avoided the subject of love and placed their emphasis on other issues that may have been easier to discuss face-to-face. The disjunction between the different data sources raised a number of questions for me: Is love a sensitive issue? How are wedding stories constructed? And finally: Do people really marry for love?

The interviews revealed how private non-heterosexual love is and how difficult it can be to share and celebrate it with others. Engaging with heterosexual love appeared far less problematic than non-heterosexual love as the following example illustrates. Guðrún’s nephew was madly in love and the whole family knew about it. She explained:

He is just 15 … and he has a girlfriend and everything. He has so much freedom and he is so happy. Everything!!!! We know when he is on the internet and when he is chatting to his girlfriend who lives in Switzerland. Everybody knows about it and he tells us everything. It is so much joy around him that it just feels like ‘aaa’. Then you think about little Guðrún who was in her shell with all her feelings and all that, you know, locked inside and it [her sexuality] was not allowed to come out until she was in her twenties. Still you hang on to this, to be in the shell, even when you are asked and everyone knows, – you still don’t flaunt the issue ‘lalalalala; I am in love lalalalallala’ [she hummed foolishly]. No, because you know it is just pushing it a little bit.

Her story underlines the accessibility of positive narratives about heterosexual love, in comparison with non-heterosexual love. While sharing non-heterosexual love is framed as ‘flaunting’ or ‘pushing’ it, heterosexual love brings ‘joy’ and ‘freedom’ which can be shared with everyone.

To my surprise, some of the women did not talk about love at all. The ones who did seemed embarrassed by raising it as a topic of discussion, judging from their body language alone. They giggled, looked away or blushed when using the word. When it was revealed, love was usually mentioned in passing and generally minimized as a reason altogether. One-way of discussing love, however, was to refer to other couples and their reasons for marrying, which appeared far less problematic than revealing your own reasons. This is how Kolbrún engaged with the seemingly sensitive subject:

Perhaps some people just want to show their love with this. I am not quite sure how [heterosexual] people think when they get married, but isn’t this [Civil Partnership] similar? Isn’t it in essence a confession of love?

Kolbrún did not offer an answer to this question so I asked directly:

Is it a confession of love to you?

And she responded with hesitation.

Yes, I believe so, yes, yeah.

Her story highlights the difficulties of discussing love, by using an interesting comparison between same sex and opposite sex couples, staged around needs and feelings. Furthermore, Kolbrún’s account shows a degree of uncertainty, where the intensity of non-heterosexual feelings is perhaps questioned as well as the possibility of love marriage between same sex couples. This suggests that marriage, as a way of signalling mutual love, is a well-established heterosexual phenomenon. Yet the level of resistance that Kolbrún and many others showed in describing their marriages in this way suggest that claiming this discourse for themselves is far from easy, both publicly, but also, within an interview setting as it cuts across the public/private divide. On the one hand it is private (in their homes), but on the other hand, the audience is public (interviewer and imagined other).

Engaging with non-heterosexual love was not just problematic, but at times, this kind of love was questioned and even invalidated. Katrín described a typical reaction when she said she was in love with a woman.

Some asked ‘are you 100% sure?’ and ‘why?’, ‘Where do you feel it?’ And you know ‘how do you know if you are in love with this woman?’ and things like this. People would never ask if I had got involved with a man, I doubt that they would ask ‘are you absolutely sure that this is the man?’ ‘How do you know that you are in love with him?’

Discussing love without referring to heterosexual relationships, and framing same sex marriage outside the equality and human rights discourse, was not only problematic, but non-heterosexual feelings of love were also subjected to cynicism. Is it love? Can we call it love? And more importantly, is it ‘real’ love? Such questioning usually came from family or straight friends/relatives, not other lesbians and gay men. With such a heteronormative construction of love, I argue that same sex love is trivialized which makes it difficult to recognize same sex love as love, and forces non-heterosexuals to justify our feelings, as we witness in Katrín's story.

While love was the most popular reason for marriage in the census data, in the interview data it was more submerged and could also be conceptualized as marrying for the wrong reasons. Guðrún, Díana and Jóhanna, who had all divorced from their same sex partners, were the only three who discussed love at length and framed it as an important factor in their rationale for their ‘failed’ marriage. Their decision was often described as ‘hasty’, or as an ‘act of madness’ at a time when partners were ‘besotted with one another’. This is interesting because it suggests that love has a rational and possibly a mature side, which these women had apparently not reached. This also ties in with assumptions about how much time couples ‘should’ leave between meeting and marrying to avoid ‘hasty’, or in other words, ‘high risk’ marriages. Guðrún, Díanna and Jóhanna failed to do this, which explains why their marriages were conceptualized as a mistake, where partners acted on impulses without knowing each other well enough to make such ‘rational’ decisions.

As we have seen, talking about love within the interview setting proved problematic. In the first place, exposing your feelings to a stranger is always difficult. Then there is an element of privacy that surrounds same sex love, which somehow, makes it even more difficult to bring such emotions to the surface. Same sex love is still very private, even among and between us non-heterosexuals and since same sex marriage was publicly framed as a security issue, it has been difficult to locate other paths for marriage. Love is not political and public, it is private for same sex couples, but given that the campaign for civil partnership did not emphasize love, this resulted in privatizing love even more.

Security

Although security was the second most popular reason for marriage reported in the census, it was generally mentioned offhandedly during the interviews or with reference to other people and their misfortune. The women’s narratives always referred back to the pre-legislation era, when same sex marriage was not an option, and same sex couples lived with great insecurity. Somehow, the discourses had not changed, even after the transformation of the legal environment when same sex couples had the freedom to marry.

‘Security’ was mainly framed in financial terms, as a way of protecting assets from ‘greedy’ relatives, or in some cases, your own partner. Yet security underlined different understandings of risk and what constituted hazardous circumstances. When the women narrated stories involving the death of a spouse or illness, as unsafe situations, their families appeared more concerned about the possible repercussions of divorce. Safety, therefore, was either threatened by families or by your spouse, but secured by state involvement. Concerns about divorce were never narrated by the women, instead, they disclosed stories of individuals who not only lost their partners, but were troubled by family members who demanded their share of the property. Their relationships were deliberately ignored. Leila mentioned a typical version of this story, but questioned whether it actually happened.

Like what you have seen in the movies when relatives have taken everything away and the person ends up on the streets. I am not sure if this has actually happened. We need this legislation, like everyone else, to live in a secure society. Otherwise we would just keep on roaming.

Besides questioning how reliable this story was, Leila also stressed the role of the state in ensuring stability. State regulation, in her account, formed the basis of society by structuring family life around marriage. This was unquestioned, as was the amount of guidance people allegedly required. Freyja, on the other hand, approached this issue differently by describing how difficult it is to refrain from marriage.

It is practical, because if we just live together then she would have no rights if one of us would fall ill or die. Then you need to protect yourself very well. You need to make a will and address everything, which is not as convenient. The structure of the society encourages people to establish a formal union, which is considered the cornerstone of the society and rewards people for various things, and I think you should naturally use it.

On both counts, the state offered security, rightly or wrongly so. The general story of assets taken by immediate families and how ‘disenfranchised’ the surviving partner was, appeared to have another role, aside from ensuring safety. Odelía and Erna believed it was important to voice stories of this kind, to raise awareness, particularly about the legal status of next of kin. These stories were used to justify why it was important for same sex couples to marry and indirectly to supply validation for their own marriages. What caught my attention about stories of this kind was the importance of raising awareness and how difficult it could be for same sex couples to talk about their own private reasons for marrying. Marrying for security reasons was both understood and accepted publicly, thanks to the campaign and the way the women themselves kept this story alive.

In general, marriage was constructed as a safety measure, a contract between the two partners against families and the state. It mostly involved risk management by protecting yourself against your partner’s family, financially, but on other occasions, it concerned recognition of next of kin and safety issues between the two individuals. Although the couples themselves generally raised these risks, there was one potential danger that families engaged with: the threat of exploitation by a partner. A few of the women, including Guðrún, had been warned by their own families to protect themselves against their partners. Guðrún, who had married her partner after a short relationship, explained this in the following way:

Everybody was yelling at me: ‘Are you going to make a prenuptial agreement, are you going to do this and are you going to do that?’ Then all these questions surfaced that people had been thinking of, but I just said: ‘No, no, no’ you know, – and nothing. I can actually be grateful for everything today, that she didn’t demand anything.

Perhaps she had every reason to be careful as the partner had moved in because of ‘lack of money’, but the external pressure to respond to the alleged threat of exploitation, is interesting. Guðrún’s’ family seemed to view her as a potential victim. She was strongly encouraged to take special safety measures to ensure that her partner would only claim back what she had contributed to financially. Furthermore, this response also conveys an important message about how the family conceptualized their motives for marrying and how much they questioned the sincerity of this marriage. The financial inequality between Guðrún and her partner was seen as a potential problem and as a result their marriage was labelled high risk. These warnings may, however, signal underlying disapproval of the marriage and an attempt to scare Guðrún off marriage.

Commitment

Commitment was the third most common reason women gave for marriage in the survey, an issue which was readily discussed during the interviews. This was usually conceptualized in two ways, as a way of discouraging promiscuity (or ‘behaving badly’ as one woman expressed it) and as signalling that a partner had been ‘reserved’ as it was phrased. The dual aspect of commitment, as a way of preventing ‘bad’ behaviour within the relationship and keeping outsiders at bay, was clearly narrated by the couple, Kolbrún and Sara, who I interviewed separately by their choice. Although Kolbrún first mentioned ‘practical’ reasons for their marriage and claimed that she did not ‘gain’ anything from being married, I strongly felt that she was holding something back. So I asked her again:

Interviewer: Were there any other reasons why you decided to go to the registry office?

Kolbrún: [Silence]

Interviewer: For you, you know/

Kolbrún: No no no, I, no. No. No. I really don’t know the reason apart from, well, showing her that I had every intention to be with her for the rest of my life. Besides, this is what it is about. I wanted to and I want to.

The significance of marriage as an emotional commitment was almost tangible, yet, very personal and at times difficult to express as a reason. Furthermore, marriage was framed as a private issue between two partners who are emotionally committed to one another for life, as well as a more public communication of fidelity to potential sexual partners. Kolbrún further elaborated on this, after I had asked her whether marriage had changed anything for her personally.

Kolbrún: No not really!! Apart from, maybe you treat your spouse in a better way – You try too.

Interviewer: How is that?

Kolbrún: Well, to be faithful to her, for instance and, yes [thinks about it for a while] you are safer in many ways. Safer!

[Long silence]

Interviewer: In what way?

Kolbrún: I have the feeling that she takes marriage very seriously. The ceremony shows her that [long silence] this is a different relationship somehow. It is more than it was … You get closer to one another [long silence], and there is a stronger sense that you will always stay together … Even though I have never had to worry about her having an affair or anything like that. Somehow [long pause] I think that she believes it is more difficult to leave me [long pause] than before [pause] if I behave badly.

Kolbrún’s initial explanation of why they got married, I argue, was not necessarily her rationale for marrying, but a reflection of the public discourse about same sex marriage. The assurance of mutual commitment appeared to be more important in Kolbrún’s case, for more personal or private reasons, but for Sara, marriage was a public announcement of commitment. Their marriage was listed on the National Register. Sara said:

If you search on the National Registry website⁸ then it says that I have been ‘reserved’ [laughs].

Up until May 2004 information about marital status was available on the World Wide Web (Þjóðskrá, 2007; National Registry, 2007). The public notice of their relationship on the National Register was undoubtedly important. To Sara this meant that she was ‘reserved’, which on the one hand was associated with her fears of being abandoned by Kolbrún but on the other it also functioned as a public statement about their relationship and their intentions to lead a monogamous life. This meant a great deal to Sara, who said:

Sara: I feel more secure about Kolbrún because I am sure she cannot leave me just like that.

Interviewer: Did you fear that she would do that?

Sara: Umm, not exactly, but you know when you don’t know the other person very well it is always in the back of your mind, in the beginning I guess. She also drank and was wild in many ways. It is difficult to have clear boundaries in situations like that.

Overall, their marriage appeared to play an important role in expressing commitment on a public and private level. While Sara was concerned about Kolbrún’s behaviour and her alleged inabilities to resist other women’s attentions, the public announcement of their marriage signified that Sara was ‘reserved’, but not Kolbrún, as might be assumed. Trust was clearly an issue, not just in the beginning, as Sara suggested, but all through their relationship. They married after 11 years of intimate life and their story highlights how one of the key roles of marriage, commitment, is played out differently between partners. Kolbrún and Sara both believed that marriage was about commitment, but for one it was a personal commitment, while for the other it had a more public connotation.

While marriage signified commitment, it also stipulated monogamy. Loyalty and trust were often presented as key factors in relationships, including Freyja’s, who had been married to her partner Katrín for six years. To her it was a ‘personal statement’ that she was ‘not going to run away’. What is interesting, however, is that their marriage not only signalled the trust they had built in each other (Giddens, 1992; Jamieson; 1998, 1999; Weeks, 2007), but marriage was automatically assumed to be monogamous and long term (Heaphy and Einarsdóttir, 2013; Heaphy et al., 2013), which has been widely challenged by scholars as a simplistic ideology of ‘romantic love’ (Bauman, 2003; Giddens, 1992; Weeks et al., 2001). Moreover, the level of commitment does not appear to be negotiable either, in contrast with Heaphy, Donovan and Week’s (2004) findings concerning fidelity and the division partners make between emotional commitment and sexual behaviour. On the whole, the women anticipated loyalty and being faithful to their partners, a phenomenon which has also been recognized amongst young civil partners in the UK (Einarsdóttir, 2012; Heaphy et al., 2013). Sexual relationships outside marriage were framed as adultery, in harmony with the way heterosexual couples often frame such experiences (Allan, 2004; Jamieson, 2004) and were to some extent a sign of a ‘failing’ marriage. When the women framed their marriage as a ‘logical continuation’ of their relationship, the ‘logic’ generally meant a long-term relationship and commitment to a monogamous lifestyle.

Conclusions

Exploring the reasons why same sex couples marry was problematic from the start. In the first place the research question is problematic in itself and ‘why should we request answers from same sex couples, when heterosexuals are not asked?’ Furthermore, ‘how can we expect them to know, when heterosexuals normally do not?’ It is precisely this, the silence that surrounds marriage, that I try to challenge with the help of same sex couples. Non-heterosexuals have both explained why they should have the right to marry and are regularly asked to justify why they do – when heterosexuals are not. Although this research does not engage with the questions of whether same sex marriage is good or bad or whether same sex couples should have the right to marry or not, it explores how public stories can facilitate and/or constrain narratives of same sex marriage.

Evans (2003) suggests that some reasons may be more acceptable than others for entering marriage, as the following quotation suggests:

To say of someone that they married ‘for money’ or ‘security’ carries with it a negative association: that person becomes a ‘gold-digger’ and as such worthy of public condemnation. We have come to expect love and romance in marriage and/or long-term relationships. It is, for Western people generally, a sign of the superiority of our culture that we do not associate marriage with explicitly material or social convenience. We no longer assume that heterosexual sexual relations have to be regulated and organized through marriage, but we do expect that marriage is constructed through love. (Evans, 2003: 21)

This extract exposes some of the controversies over marriage and the significance of it in our lives. Is marriage about money, security or social convenience, or is it about love, care or commitment? While Evans argues that the only ‘socially acceptable’ reason for marriage must be love (2003), others share a more pragmatic view of it and frame marriage as a contract (Bauman, 2003; Giddens, 1992, 2003) of mutual convenience. My findings suggest that even though the campaign for same sex marriage largely focused on equality and human rights, most of the couples in this study married for love. Love as a reason, however, was not easily captured during the interviews. In the first place, same sex love is difficult to discuss in Iceland and is generally perceived as a private matter, and then, contrasting Evan’s claims, love was often framed as an inadequate reason, and in some cases love marriages were constructed as marrying for the wrong reasons, particularly when the timing was not right and partners entered into seemingly high risk marriages. Exploring the development of love marriages, is fascinating, particularly the question of whether same sex marriage will follow the path of opposite sex marriage as ‘just a piece of paper’ as Clark, Burgoyne and Burns (2006) suggest or challenge the perception of marriage as a business contract (Baumann, 2003; Giddens, 1992, 2003).

The paradigm for same sex love did not exist, which made it difficult for the women in this study to articulate their feelings and to consider marrying for love a valid reason without reference to heterosexual marriage. This, I argue, was partly to do with the absence of emotional freedom, as a bargaining point in the campaign for same sex marriage, but there is another side to this – the interview setting. Even when a ‘culture of public problems’ (Plummer, 1995) had been established in Iceland, telling someone face-to-face seemed different – a point which Plummer’s framework for Telling Sexual Stories does not fully explain. Discussing love in the presence of a stranger (researcher) in a prefabricated situation (the interview setting) is at best challenging (as any talk about the intangible would be), and at worst, awkward. Besides, love in public discourse takes the shape of ‘confession’ which adds another layer of issues: To whom are you confessing? There is no denying that most of the women were embarrassed to talk about love in my presence, except in relation to the ‘honeymoon’ period or when their marriage had failed, drawing on public discourses of the temporality of love and failed love.

The second most popular reason security, unlike love, corresponded with the equality discourses used in the campaign and was readily discussed in the interviews. Security was normally framed in financial terms, either relating to the potential partner’s death as a shield against in-laws, or as a way of securing assets against a partner. But security had an emotional side as well, which was not easily teased away from the third reason, commitment. In effect, marriage was always perceived as a long-term monogamous commitment between the partners, a private declaration of commitment to your partner or a public announcement of your marital status.

On the whole, commitment entailed emotional responsibilities and mutual care to the women who were involved in this study. They conceptualized marriage as a permanent emotional contract of loyalty where being faithful to your partner was generally assumed, but hardly discussed and never negotiated. Interpreting marriage in these terms by highlighting fidelity and durability sharply contrasts with literature that associates relationships with the principles of marketing (Bauman, 2003) where terms and conditions are negotiated and contracts terminated. Their stories, in fact, pictured commitment, love and security as inseparable entities, where the meaning of ‘security’ varied from being purely emotional to having financial and symbolic significance where same sex couples were recognized as a family.

By relying on two different sources, census data and interview data, I have demonstrated the importance of placing stories of same sex marriage in context. Personal accounts, I argue, are in conversation with public discourses about same sex marriage and love. This not only shapes what stories are told and how, but it may ultimately raise questions about how freely people choose to marry. Whichever way we look at it, the women had the choice to marry and they did, for reasons that felt private, and they struggled to frame their marriage outside of the public story of equality. Whilst calling attention to emotional freedom may not have achieved the same legal results for same sex couples, it would have exposed what marriage to all intents and purposes is about – love commitment and emotional security – personal reasons indeed.

Footnotes

Funding

I am grateful to London South Bank University for funding this census.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Marianna Fotaki and the anonymous reviewers for their support and constructive feedback on early drafts of this article. I would also like to thank my PhD supervisors, Professor Jeffrey Weeks and Professor Rachel Thomas for their continuous support, and above all, the people who took part in the study and made it real.

Notes

Anna Einarsdóttir has researched formalized same sex unions both in Iceland and in the UK. She is currently based at the University of Manchester Business School, working with Professor Helge Hoel (University of Manchester), and Professor Duncan Lewis (Plymouth Univesity), on an ESRC funded project regaridng bullying harassment and discrimination of lesbian, gay and bisexual employees in the workplace.

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