PACStastic

The New York Times recently published a really interesting article on the PACS, here.

Just a brief background for those who aren't familiar with the PACS - it was started back in 1999 as a way to give homosexual couples similar rights to those of marriage. The funny thing is though, it has always been more popular with heterosexual couples - as the article states, one year after the invention of the PACS, 75% of the couples pacsing were straight. And last year, a whopping 95% of them were heterosexual.

They also say that there are now two PACSes for every three marriages, which I think is a pretty surprising statistic. And the number of couples getting pacsed already outnumbers the couples getting married in Paris 11th arrondissement. I was talking with C about it last night, and almost everybody I knew back in Bretagne was pacsed and not married (both foreign & French couples). Though I do have to say that most of the people I know here in Paris are married.

They give several reasons for the rise in PACSing - people who are not yet ready to get married but yet who want some kind of commitment, people who want the tax benefits, people who are against The Man, people who come from divorced families, etc.

I know Fab & I got pacsed because I wasn't ready to get married and be stuck in Bretagne forever, and it was the easiest way for me to stay at the time. I had always thought we'd end up getting married someday though, and I think a lot of my friends who are pacsed probably feel the same way - like it's a sort of stepping-stone to marriage, a way to buy time. C however says he would never get pacsed - he seems to feel, as one blogger so eloquently put it on my old SamdeBretagne blog, that one should "Take a sh*t or get off the pot".

Personally though, I don't think it's as black and white as that, and I am happy that there is at least something that exists for homosexual couples, even if it seems that most of them would still rather be able to get married instead.