It didn't look like a traditional wedding. She wasn’t wearing white and he didn’t have a best man. No rings were exchanged, and the transport wasn’t a ribbon-trussed Rolls-Royce but the 8.30am flight from London City Airport. The witnesses were a government official with a friend, and the photographer was a local reporter with his iPhone. Afterwards they had a toastie and a mug of tea in a local café.
But then it wasn’t a wedding at all. It was a heterosexual civil partnership.
For Martin Loat and Claire Beale it was important not to have anything too grand to mark the moment.
Loat says: “We see ourselves as long-term partners and stewards of our family, not a hand-holding lovey-dovey couple.” Although he concedes that they had “a bit of a kiss”.
On October 21, the couple from Ealing became the first UK couple to have a heterosexual civil partnership. The ceremony took place on the Isle of Man, the only part of the British Isles that allows it, but it will not be recognised by the UK government despite the pair having been together for almost 25 years.
They met in 1991 when Loat thrust a press release into Beale’s hand at a conference. Now he runs a PR company and she is a magazine editor, and they have a 15-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. They refer to themselves as one of the millions of “happily unmarried” couples in the UK and although they thought about it after a few years of being together, they quickly decided marriage wasn’t for them.
Loat explains: “We respect people who get married. It’s just too heavy and traditional an institution for us. I think it would be jumping on the bandwagon for the sake of it.
“We’ve got friends who have met each other, got married and got divorced within the 25 years we’ve been together ... we don’t need to prove that we’re a safe unit. Where we find ourselves now is that we don’t have that legal and financial recognition of our relationship or our family.”
In the UK the law only allows same- sex couples to have a civil partnership in place of a marriage. Loat and Beale would like the wording amended so that this is extended to heterosexual couples, and believe this should have been changed when same-sex marriages were introduced.
This Wednesday another couple, Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, will be in court to appeal a High Court decision that ruled against their challenge that the banning of opposite-sex civil partnerships is discriminatory. They have set up the Equal Civil Partnerships campaign to call on the Government to extend the right to heterosexual partners.
Why not just get married in a civil service? “When met, marriage was imbued with patriarchal heritage and I never felt comfortable with those associations,” says Beale. “Marriage has been modernised, but our relationship has also changed from heady romance to a loving partnership centred around family. For us it’s a legal need, not an emotional need.”
Currently, should one of them die, their assets would be subject to inheritance tax. And as an unmarried father of a child born before 2003 (when this legal detail was changed) Loat wasn’t able to sort out a replacement passport for an upcoming school skiing trip because he does not have legal parental responsibility for their son.
In all other respects, they seem like any other long-term couple. She thinks he hoards; he thinks she buys too much. They argued for a long time over whether or not to get a dog (she won and the dog is called Snowy).
But perhaps it was obvious that they would not follow tradition — on their first date they went to a virtual reality booth in Covent Garden. Loat explains: “You could fight a battle with stick men and our characters fell in love at first blow.”
And for them, that’s all they need.
*** Published on Evening Standard
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