Every day the papers are filled with news of celebrity couples trying to undo their marriage bonds, writes Declan Kiberd.
Now we read of a lesbian pair who seek the ratification of the married state. Has anything changed since the essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) compared marriage to a cage, with the birds inside seeking to get out, while those outside try desperately to get in?
Last week Dr Katherine Zappone asked the High Court to recognise her Canadian marriage to Dr Ann Louise Gilligan. They have been living together, caring for each other in sickness and health, for 25 years. They married legally in Canada in 2003. If that certificate cannot be recognised here, they contend, they should have the right to marry under Irish law.
There will be many more cases made by same-sex couples, males as well as female. The issues raised are complex and challenging.
Fifteen years ago, a former colleague of mine in a Californian university died suddenly. He happened to have been gay and to have lived for many decades with the same partner. The couple had entertained my wife and me to dinner on many occasions, displaying their ultra-modern apartment with obvious pride.
When my colleague passed on, his partner got embroiled in an acrimonious legal battle. Having been in what was tantamount to a family relationship, he contended that he had the right to stay on in their rent-controlled flat. The judge in Santa Barbara threw out the case, but up in San Francisco or down in Los Angeles, my friend would have won with little difficulty. Those cities by the early 1990s had "domestic partnerships laws", by which straight and gay couples in long-standing relationships might qualify for pension, housing and insurance rights.
If you think such laws are a recipe for endless litigation, you are quite right. But it's inevitable. Ever since the 1960s, more and more people have lived in stable relationships outside of traditional marriage - in Ireland now well over one in five children is born out of wedlock.
In the US today, courts are filled with claimants in cities that recognise "domestic partnerships". Such claimants have to prove financial interdependence and shared living over a significant period, as Drs Zappone and Gilligan who lived together and jointly shared properties have done.
The American cases have often proved tricky to adjudicate, especially when the relationship has been a gay couple. Surviving kith and kin often make a protracted claim against their dead relative's estate, while the inheritance lawyers clean up. Hence the proposal that states recognise same-sex marriage.
The proposal has been opposed, of course, but often on spurious grounds. Conservative columnists, with no sense of self-irony, portray the attempt to found a gay family as an attack on traditional family values. The idea has also been laughed to scorn by "radical" elements within the gay community, elements which like to see themselves as locked into a perpetual war with the repressive institutions of bourgeois society.
A country like ours, which decriminalised homosexuality in the 1990s with no great rancour, should be open to this change. After all, our very Constitution enshrines the family unit as the basis of this society. It is now more than 15 years since a float bearing members of the Gay and Lesbian Network was cheered down O'Connell Street in the St Patrick's Day Parade.
For Drs Zappone and Gilligan, the benefits of a formalised marriage are just the same as those for heterosexual people: they make a lifelong vow of commitment in full view of family and friends. Once we accept that homosexual relationships are on the same level as heterosexual ones, then the same social responsibility can be expected of gay persons in the conduct of their lives.
It was the furtive, clandestine and ultimately illegal nature of gay sex which often in the past militated against the development of stable relationships. After Aids, most people want not just safety but the stability that goes with it. Far from deploring gay marriage, traditionalists should applaud the idea.
Once gay weddings are legal, partners could buy houses and plan for a future as a couple in the community. They will find an outlet for familial instincts which in the past led some desperate souls, for the sake of appearances, into ill-advised marriages with members of the opposite sex.
Teenagers, on finding themselves gay, will have ready role models; and the barriers of hurt that can separate them from their own families will be broken down.
Marriage has many pains, joked Dr Johnson, but the single life has fewer pleasures. Gay marriage is a good idea - but has the community, gay as well as straight, got the imagination to go through with it?