Indeed! During the last census, if you put your same-sex partner down as your husband/wife they’d “correct” that for you (immediately if you filed digitally, in aggregate if you filed on paper) to “civil partner”, a FoI request by a friend of a friend revealed. Which was, I suppose, correct in line with what the laws of the land recognised at the time (same sex marriage wasn’t legalised until between 2014 and 2020 depending on where in the UK you are) but the census doesn’t record just citizens but everybody in the country on a particular date. If a married gay couple from, say, the Netherlands was in the UK on the date of the last census their status would be “corrected” for them.

In the case of polyamory, though, there isn’t even a legal justification for such “correction”. Because unlike the laws that formerly decreed that marriage could only be between a man and a woman, I’m not aware of any law in modern times that would prohibit a person from having two romantic partners!

Recording this kind of thing matters. Folks in polyamorous relationships don’t get some of the benefits and privileges of those in other kinds of relationships, and while that’s small potatoes on the scale of injustices it’s not going to get fixed if we can’t measure it. I was really glad to see that this year’s census will include (optional) questions on gender identity and sexual orientation, because again: this is important to record. We’re getting there.