A same-sex couple in a civil union from Northern Ireland has been said they need to separate for two years before getting married in Scotland. A new Scotland law in force since December allows civil partnerships to be converted into marriages but things are not actually so easy. Sean and John met in 2000 and several years later they had a civil union in Northern Ireland. They became to make plans to get married and set the date, but the registrar contacted them to say they couldn’t legally marry. “It transpired that it's actually not legal to change our civil partnership into a marriage in Scotland, because we had a civil partnership in Northern Ireland. The advice we were given was that we could dissolve our civil partnership - get divorced to get married - and we'd have to live apart for maybe two years. It was just ludicrous”, said Sean.