The Guardian newspaper reports that the number of people who are married or in a civil partnership has fallen below fifty per cent of the over sixteens for the first time since the early nineteen seventies. Heterosexual marriage continues its slow decline. But same-sex marriages have increased, with the estimated number of people in these marriages at 167,000 in 2022, up from 26,000 in 2015. And civil partnerships as a modern replacement for an institution that many LGBTQIA+ people and feminists feel is predicated on the historic enslavement of women, has continued to gr