I’ve been thinking about marriage of late. This isn’t at all coincidental, as the universe appears to have done everything in its power to ensure that this is the case. In the past week:
- I visited my sister, for the first time since she got married.
- I flew to Winnipeg, partially to attend a friend’s sister’s wedding.
- I learned my dad and his partner plan to get married.
- And Proposition 8 was overturned in the USA.
That’s a substantial number of matrimonial events weighing on my mind. The last one is probably the most pertinent, as it’s the most overtly political. I mean, same-sex marriage has been legal here in Canada for a long time. But it’s good to see that it’s slowly moving forward in the USA as well. That being said, allow me to say something some may find shocking (though not, really, if you pay attention to what I’ve said in the past, in various outlets).
I don’t actually believe in marriage.
Or rather, let me clarify: I don’t believe in marriage as a path to legal recognition. As a ceremony of commitment between two (or more) people, I think there’s a lot to be said for it. I mean, I certainly feel it’s possible to have a committed relationship outside of the framework of marriage, but I’m not about to tell anyone their wanting a ceremony to mark said commitment is wrong, or bad. That would be silly.
But I don’t think the government should be involved. A lot of the discussion in the marriage debate has centred around rights–rights married couples have that unmarried ones don’t. Hospital visitations. Joint taxes. Myriad other things (I freely admit I do not know every single way couples benefit from a legally recognized marriage. But I know that in the USA there are over 1,000 benefits at the federal level). I think that, inasmuch as there is a system that grants access to these rights, it is certainly unjust to exclude queer/same-sex couples from that system, which is why I very much support the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and celebrate when it occurs in various locales.
My question, though, is simply this: why must marriage be necessary to access these benefits at all? I mean, yes, in Canada queer married couples have access to all of the same rights as straight ones. But poly relationships, for example, meet with no legal recognition.
Privileging marriage–whether same- or cross-sex–is privileging one kind of relationship above others, and above people who aren’t in relationships, but still trust each other intimately. And that is something I have a great deal of trouble with. I feel, to put it bluntly, that it’s really messed up.
So, no, I don’t support marriage. Not as a legal construct. As something emotionally meaningful to many people, certainly. And that’s not insignificant! But I don’t think it should be the path to tangible benefits, encoded into law. I’m not about to start crusading against same-sex marriage; as I said above, if it is going to have legal benefits, I support those being made available to as many people as possible.
I just feel that it’s a decidedly flawed model.
It’s only been quite recently that I’ve been thinking about marriage – or rather, partnered life – as a privileged existence. And I don’t just mean the legal privileges, but the social ones as well. I suppose since I’ve been in a committed, hetero, monogamous relationship for almost all of my adult life, it has taken me a while to get enough perspective to be able to view this state of affairs more objectively. So this is a round about way of saying that I support what you are saying here: I am wholeheartedly in favour of equal marriage rights. But I also think that the privilege inherent in being part of a legally or socially recognised couple is something we need to explore and unpack and question far more than we, as a society, currently do. Doing so would have implications for how we view families child-rearing as well, and I have to say I think they’re probably positive implications in the long term. (Acknowledging that ‘it takes a village’ to raise a child is all well and good, but when families are almost exclusively based around sexual/economic ties between two people, villages are actually quite hard to come by.)
I agree with you. I live in a country, the Netherlands, where marriage is nowadays hardly a privilege, which is a good thing. Not only used to be there a lot of benefits attached to marriage that weren’t available to other relationships, but there used to be a lot of obligations. I’m glad a lot of these obstacles to marriage are out of the way, and I’m glad that couples who choose not to marry, can enjoy most benefits that married couples do. Unfortunately, poly relationships are still left behind here.
I definitely agree that everyone should be privy to the same legal rights whether single, married, in a long term non-married relationship, gay, straight, in a romantic friendship, poly or whatever.
I’m not exactly a “new pie” feminist, however, though, so I don’t disagree with arguing for marriage as a stepping stone, though, in a society wherein these rights are conferred via marriage — I just think that perhaps we are going about it the wrong way (since if we continue to go down this road all these disparate groups are, one at a time, going to have to argue for marriage — and the ones who don’t WANT to have a committment ceremony with each other are STILL left out) and that we need to start demanding these rights be taken out of the context of marriage.
As a side note, I think “people who trust eachother intimately” ARE in a relationship. It might not be a sexual-romantic relationship, but it is a relationship. At least, I would define my love-relationships with my friends as real relationships. It bothers me a little when people refer to couples in monogamous (or even poly) sexual relationships as ‘in relationships’ and to close friends as ‘not in relationships’.
@winged No, I agree with you on your point re: people who trust each other. I just find that a lot of the time when I use the word “relationship”, people parse it as “romantic/sexual”, which…I don’t agree with. But I wanted to be clear that I wasn’t excluding ties that don’t follow that model.