Paul Thomas: Soul mates give way to fashion accessories

Two middle-aged Canadian men have succumbed to stage-fright on the verge of pulling off one of the great stunts of our time.

When the Canadian Government legalised same-sex marriages last month, Bryan Pinn and Bill Dalyrmple spotted a loophole: the law didn't specify that the happy couple had to be gay.

Bryan and Bill have been best friends for 22 years. In Hollywood the claim that "we're just good friends" is usually code for "we play mattress polo morning, noon and night".

In Canada, however, folks say what they mean and mean what they say. So when a couple of Canadian blokes say they're friends, it means they borrow each other's electric drills, watch ice hockey together and bond in comfortable near-silence over a few beers.

And when it's time to call it a night, they exchange grunts and go their separate ways.

Having spotted the loophole, the pals realised that, tax-wise, they'd be significantly better off as an official item as opposed to a pair of post-divorce bachelors.

So Bryan proposed, Bill accepted and they started making plans to get a house and live together.

But when they became the focus of media scrutiny after signalling their intentions in a letter to a newspaper, the betrothed buddies lost their nerve. They canned the wedding, characterising the whole business as a moment of whimsy that spun out of control.

The change of mind was no doubt assisted by the realisation that there's something profoundly un-Canadian about inviting the whole world into your private life. That sort of thing is best left to their southern neighbours.

But it's a pity they didn't go through with it. As provocative gestures go, it met the two essential criteria: it would have offended ideologues on both sides of the socio-cultural divide and triggered some entertaining, if not necessarily enlightening, debate.

The gay lobby would have seen it as making a mockery of same-sex marriage, a crucial bridgehead in its campaign to eliminate the last vestiges of anti-gay discrimination.

Conservatives, particularly of a religious bent, would have seen it as further undermining holy matrimony. To ragged-trousered idealists, it would have been yet another example of our society's urge to put a price-tag on everything. Only accountants would have been happy.

But let's face it, marriage ain't what it used to be. In this country there are around 20,000 marriages and 10,000 divorces a year. Roughly speaking, half our marriages don't go the distance. In one in three marriages, at least one partner has been married before.

When the subject came up at a party, people discussed their multiple marriages without hesitation or embarrassment. It was treated as a fact of life, as if everybody knows it takes two or three goes to get the hang of it.

When someone announced he was on his first which was still going strong after 25 years, the reaction recalled the celebrated H. M. Bateman cartoons in which onlookers recoil in disgust from the oblivious perpetrator of a faux pas - The Man Who Threw A Snowball At St Moritz.

The old institution has taken a fearful battering over the past 30-odd years because we no longer take "till death do us part" seriously.

A component of that is our attachment to the notion of romantic love. We yearn for it, we treat it as the sine qua non of marriage, but we're increasingly reconciled to its impermanence.

When it peters out, rather than accepting the situation as a normal, if not inevitable, development and soldiering on as previous generations did, we go looking for it elsewhere and start the whole cycle all over again.

Given that romantic love and "till death do us part" seem mutually contradictory, those who treasure the institution of marriage should be encouraged by the Canadian initiative.

Straight same-sex marriage - mate marriage, if you will - may be a way to stop this epidemic of divorce, statistically and by providing a working model of marriages that last.

As for the tax issue, why should bachelors and spinsters miss out on the hand-outs? Seeing tax avoidance and minimisation is a game we all play, it seems odd and unfair that those who choose not to enter an institution in obvious decline should be disadvantaged.

Although Bryan and Bill failed to seize the moment, there are social revolutionaries out there who have the boldness to consign outmoded conventions to the dustbin of history.

Take Paris Hilton, that icon of our post-modern, self-indulgent, sex-crazed, celebrity-obsessed age, a genuine multimedia personality and the definitive example of a person who's famous for being famous.

While some of us cling to the sentimental view of dogs as man's best friend, Paris is radically redefining this relationship. She discarded her chihuahua Tinkerbell when it became too big to perform its core role of fashion accessory.

This much sought-after gig has gone to the more petite and altogether more manageable Bambi, who apparently is a much better fit with Ms Hilton's wardrobe.