There is a certain comic irony – happily, not darkly comic – that after more than forty years of taking marriage for granted, marriage has decided it is tired of this, and is taking a hand in the game".
President François Hollande, a Socialist, promised during his campaign to legalize gay marriage within a year of taking office in May 2012.
That is unless Labor takes out the next election, then things are more straightforward: they've vowed to introduce a bill to legalise same-sex marriage within 100 days of taking office.
The girl who flirts outside the marriage, but would never dream of taking it further?
Franklin, who had suffered much from "that hard to be govern'd Passion of Youth," wrote a letter advising a young man suffering the same, but unwilling to seek the remedy of marriage, to take only older women for mistresses, because "There is no hazard of Children".
It's equally difficult to understand why Idina treated many of her husbands as disposable hankies, or why she continually undermined each of these marriages by taking dozens of lovers.
GETTING hitched has become terrifically unfashionable: the number of marriages taking place in England and Wales is almost at its lowest since centralised records began, and below the levels recorded in 1895.
Not all who oppose gay marriage, of course, take this path, and many people take their position out of true religious conviction rather than a base prejudice bled clear of love.
"Records show that within a month of marriage taking place he applied to the Home Office for a right of residence because of that marriage".
But when he gets into his battered old Mercury — the sole survivor of his marriage — to take his father on drives, the car carries him again and again past his ex's "stubbornly ugly house".
