Sex is the least of it. Sex, however, is what grabs attention, and so I place the word at the head of this column in hopes of hooking you in. By the time you read this our national hang-up with sex will have twisted a thoroughly sensible little proposal trailed yesterday by Barbara Roche (a minister in the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office) into headlines like “Gay couples to wed” — Minister.

No matter. At least the media cartoon affords us the joy of caricaturing a career-trajectory for John Prescott, starting at a secondary modern school in Ellesmere Port, moving into a phase of working-class activism as a northern trade unionist and gritty sea-dog, and ending by administering political blessing to gay marriage. As the young son of the salt stacked the dishes and served the lager in the role of ship’s steward, did he and his Seaman’s Union mates have any idea where it would all end up this December? A seagoing Ghost of Christmases-to-come would have been sent away with a flea in his ear.

But none of this makes his department’s proposal any less sensible. What Mrs Roche said yesterday was that next summer the Government hopes to publish a consultation paper about what shape a civil partnership contract might take.

The proposal is not new. I — among many — was arguing for this more than a decade ago. The Stonewall lobbying group has been working on such a proposal for years. The Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester of Herne Hill recently put forward his own Bill in the Upper Chamber, which the Government could have taken forward. But none of us will be anything but delighted that new Labour has nicked our idea and summoned up the courage to run with it.

The idea is as follows. For all sorts of reasons two people who could not marry may want to live together. “Live together” may or may not mean sleep together, but no legal document is anyway required for that. What distinguishes the kind of living together we are discussing here is permanence: a couple’s determination to throw in their lot with each other, set up a household together, and join their lives in a significant and practical way. When people do this the law and the State offer no shelter or support for either party to the arrangement unless the couple are cohabiting in a heterosexual relationship.

By shelter or support I mean, for example, legal presumptions about such things as inheritance should one partner die, rights of occupation of the property they share, pension rights for the survivor where the deceased person had a pensions policy, and a variety of small and large concerns where the assumption of an agreed status arising from the relationship eases the path of either or both. It sounds mundane but can be of the last importance not only in practical problems such as bereavement, but in conferring an agreed name, and the dignity which goes with it, on a close and permanent pairing.

Lesbian or gay couples are only the most sensational example. Two sisters, spinsters who have reached the settled conclusion that they like each other’s company best, might want — indeed often arrange — to do the same. An elderly gentleman and his long-time housekeeper who have not the least intention of sharing a bed but have drifted by degrees into sharing a house and a life, may equally qualify. My late Aunty Chrissie, who cared for decades for her much older friend and relative, my late Aunt Dolly, would have benefited from such support.

This was not a lesbian relationship. Sex wasn’t the point.

It so often isn’t. Sex is a strange and ambiguous thing, much misreported and misunderstood. There can be few subjects of which the standard picture — the statue in the park, as it were, erected by public subscription — differs more strikingly from the myriad and shifting truths of real people’s real lives.

If these truths could be established we would discover that millions of married couples no longer make love to each other much, or at all, yet remain fulfilled as couples and functional as working households.

We would discover that sex — so often the spur which drives people together — is rarely the glue that keeps them together. Other, deeper, bonds develop; or if they fail, the partnership dissolves. We would discover that the rigid categories “hetero- and homo- sexual” do not begin to describe the scatter of competing attractions to which the human animal is prone. We would discover that we are very variously stirred — variously not only as between ourselves, but within our own breasts too. We would discover that habit, convenience and circumstance play at least as great a part in defining what we like to call “orientation”. In truth, we are orienteering on a very complicated map.

Human couples of the opposite sex get together and stay together not only but not least for the purpose of begetting and raising children.

In the transition from religion to law the contract which makes their union has got itself into rather a conceptual muddle. Once, when the Church all but regulated society, God’s blessing, formally pronounced by a priest after public promises had been made, was all that was needed to seal the knot.

Times Recommends

• The ghost of Robin Cook haunts Chilcot’s feast
• The truth shouldn’t need oaths
• Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys