What does it mean to reply instantly when asked the date of one’s wedding or formalized civil union?

When asked their wedding date, 81% of married persons in France answer spontaneously and only 7% do not recall the date, whereas 42% of PACS-ed persons do not spontaneously remember the date the date they officially registered that civil union and 37% simply do not recall the date. Regardless of whether married respondents were wedded some years previous to the survey or more recently, they generally knew the date, while the same holds only partially for PACS-ed people. Among respondents who formalized their union between 2011 and early 2014, 89% percent of those for whom that union was marriage spontaneously indicated the exact date, while only 50% of PACS-ed respondents did so. Within this same cohort, 3% of married persons do not know the date they were married, while the corresponding figure for PACS-ed persons is 30%. People seem to attach more importance to marriage, a type of union historically celebrated and publicized, than to civil union, a more recent type that for some respondents carries no symbolic dimension.

Regardless of union type, women respond “more” spontaneously than men: 87% of married women reply without delay as against 74% of married men; the corresponding figures for PACS-ed people is 49% of women versus 35% of men. One possible explanation for this is that women attach greater importance to entering into an official union, and that women in different-sex couples are more likely than men to think of civil union as a direct alternative to marriage, since they traditionally undergo more pressure to get married than men. We can also hypothesize that because women are more likely than men to have done the administrative paperwork required to officialize a civil union, they recall the date better. 

For weddings as well as PACSes, several characteristics are associated with giving the date “more” rather than “less” spontaneously: being a woman, being young, having more than 2 years of higher education (for marriage) or the equivalent of a high school degree or above (for the PACS).

But in addition to those characteristics, and in the case of both marriage and PACS, having chosen to engage in a union for instrumental motives (legal, administrative, fiscal) reduces the degree of spontaneity with which one remembers the date of the event. Conversely, investing an official union with symbolic meaning by accompanying it with a celebration or other ritual correlates with better memory of the date. Nonetheless, among PACS-ed people the contrast is sharper than among married people since reasons for contracting a PACS vary greatly by individual. 

These results show that indicating an event date more or less spontaneously is linked to the meaning individuals attribute to events and the staging or publicizing of them. They therefore help us understand the social significance(s) of these events. 

Source: Wilfried Rault et Arnaud Régnier-Loilier, 2022, Dire sa date de mariage ou de Pacs. La spontanéité des réponses reflète-t-elle le sens des évènements biographiques ?, Revue Française de Sociologie 62: 481-515.

Contact: Wilfried Rault and Arnaud Régnier-Loilier

Online: April 2023