by Patrick Appel
A French-American reader living in Paris writes:
I think a lot of straight couples in France do use the PaCS as a "dumping ground" for less serious relationships. And I know a lot of people who've ended their PaCS to get married when they decided to make that commitment (and others who plan on staying pacsed for life). Whether it "devalues" gay relationships is beside the point: the PaCS was always available to everybody (actually because reserving it for gay couples was deemed discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional!). So gay couples adopted the same attitude from the very beginning.
I have gay friends who have been through three PaCS, and I am in my mid-twenties. It's just that the possibility of making a more serious promise doesn't exist (yet). Among people of my generation, the PaCS is the inevitable first step: when a couple is living together and paying bills together, the PaCS can provide significant protection. I would never ask a couple living together whether they are married, but I would ask whether they are pacsed. Perhaps that's a testament to its success. Lots of people, gay and straight, find it's preferable to marriage. But everybody deserves to make that choice.
The Dish 