Last Thursday, the Malta Confederation of Women's Organisations held a public dialogue on the subject: 'Rights and Responsibilities of Cohabiting Couples'. The intention is to submit a memorandum to the Social Affairs Committee of Parliament, which is considering legislation on the subject. You were the only male member on the panel. How far do you think the MCWO will be able to make up for the dearth of contributions on the topic that Edwin Vassallo, chairman of the committee, lamented over?

My impression is that the MCWO will insist first of all that there should be a clarification for the public of the scope of the intended legislation. Even the majority of those present at the dialogue seemed to be more interested in two questions that I do not think an Act on Cohabitation will provide definitive answers to.

The first question is that of separated couples seeking re-marriage. The second question is that of homosexuals seeking married status. These questions are of the greatest concern to perhaps the two most significant groups of cohabiting people in Malta. I say "perhaps" because there is little information on the numbers involved or classification of types of cohabitation according to motives. A resolution proposed at the end of the meeting was to request the National Statistics Office to seek to alleviate our ignorance.

The general feeling at the end of the dialogue was that there is bound to be disgruntlement unless care is taken not to arouse misplaced hopes in what a cohabitation law is apt to provide.

What was your own input to the discussion?

It was to give as simple an account as possible of the concept of cohabitation. The definition I proposed is "companionship in as comfortable a residence as feasible".

Companionship is a form of union between people, two or more, that lies between two extremes. The first is a union of selves such as is, for instance, the goal in marriage. The other is a union merely of interests, such as characterises business partnerships, even if the partnership is taken to include dwelling together, for instance, in an Israeli kibbutz.

In other words, it is the aspect of cohabitation as such, the dwelling in a common place and its general implications, that I expect the law to deal with. The scope of the cohabitation may include reproduction purposes (e.g. family construction) or production purposes (working together). However, matters relating to such purposes are appropriately dealt with by other laws (such as family or labour laws).

A Cohabitation Act is consequently bound to be very different in its structure and provisions from a law concerning marriage. The contrast was brought out very clearly by Lorraine Schembri Orland, one of my co-panelists, in her comparative analysis of cohabitation legislation in various countries ranging from Australia to the UK (where the relevant Bill is still in gestation). The family orientation, a central feature of marriage laws, is almost totally absent from cohabitation laws, since inter-generational (and sexual) relations are of inversely proportional importance in one and the other context.

A Cohabitation Act is equally very different from a law merely governing a market kind of relationship. This is due to the fact that the rights and obligations stemming from cohabitation go beyond what can be stipulated in strictly contractual terms - that is giving, and taking, where it is of mutual interest.

Implicit awareness of this unquantifiable (because not material) dimension of cohabitation is precisely why it was so tempting to participants in the dialogue to expect Cohabitation Law to be analogous to matrimonial.

Even if a business relationship involves some form of co-dwelling, the necessary skills required for its successful carrying out, unlike the love essential to marriage, are basically technical. Cohabitation requires an emotive investment that can only come from human resources that lie much deeper than the merely technical.

Nevertheless, once the mind has been freed of the marriage paradigm when thinking about cohabitation, another temptation emerges equally seductively: that of thinking that the governance of cohabitation is reducible to regulating equitable entitlement to euros.

In fact, cohabitation implies more than, say, the relation between partners in a condominium. Such a partnership could mean living in an apartment, which involves shared management of common spaces and due respect for the privacy and quiet possession of allotted spaces.

This specification corresponds to the second part of my proposed definition of cohabitation, namely "in as comfortable a residence as possible", but such a style of spatial occupancy does not conform to the first part, namely "companionship", since the ordinary understanding of that word implies some degree of intimacy, or sharing in a particular story or history that is not the experience of all human beings.

Hence, it is less appropriate to leave rights and obligations of cohabitants to be determined by contract voluntarily entered into by themselves than to have a law that spells out the minimal conditions for equity that arise out of the very fact of dwelling together.

This way of life is rooted in human nature. It expresses that aspect of human nature which feels up-rootedness to be a cultural disaster, which seeks relative permanence and stability of residence.

What provisions should the law therefore contain?

Cohabitation, unlike marriage, is of its nature not forever. Hence protection for the weaker cohabitant is needed when death or its simulacra dissolve the union rooted in place-sharing.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Margaret Zammit.