I don't
I have married friends. I have even gone to some of their weddings. I don't sit around yelling at them that they should throw their rings into the trash, but if you're not already married, might I suggest that you choose not to participate in this outmoded and most stupid of social customs? I'm glad you two love each other, but I will never understand why people get married.
(To irritate you even more while reading this essay, sprinkled throughout are cutie-cutie-pukey pictures of me and my non-married sweetheart of the last 10 years).
Here are all the reasons I can think of to convince you not to get married:
1) Marriage is antiquated. Does anyone in the world except me remember the original purpose of marriage? Marriage was a way of assuring a family continued power by selling their daughter into the service of the highest-classed boy they could afford. Marriages combined armies and lands – all that crap. Why would anyone want to participate in a system with these kinds of roots?
2) Marriage is the ultimate sell-out. I've been reading a pretty good book called Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America by Ann Powers, and here’s what she has to say about marriage:
"Yet the pull of convention is strong when it comes to matters of the heart. The same myth of romance that smothers frank talk about sex upholds this institution, even where you’d expect it to wither. Most bohemians express some hesitation about matrimony, but end up wed. they just wait much longer, and when they do succumb, they spend a good deal of energy – often within their self-designed ceremonies – trying to make sense of their decision. "another tree falls in the forest," says one resolutely single friend whenever a long-attached couple marries. The pair blushes, mumbling about relatives and health insurance, the bride insisting that she won’t be wearing white" (p.267).
Powers herself is married, and she describes her & her friends’ marriages as counterculture events, trying to convince us that marriage can be more than just a ceremony pledging allegiance to our sado-society and everything it encompasses (the phrase sado-society is from Mary Daly, a fiercely anti-marriage lesbian).
Well, the idea of marriage being a counterculture event is making me want to vomit. Most of the time at least, when you feel the need to apologize or explain something it’s because deep down you know that it’s wrong. My mother always points this out with meat eaters: have you noticed that whenever you tell one of the miserable creatures about your fab vegan life they always stutter on about how "I don’t eat red
3) Marriage is the ultimate brainwash. Why is it that so many counter-culture people still feel the need to get married? I absolutely do not understand the pull of this ridiculous custom. Even my own parents (who are so out of mainstream culture that our house was enveloped in a constant cloud of pot smoke my entire childhood, no one cared that i did not brush my hair until i was about 15, and my father’s favorite phrase is still "just shine it on, man. shine it on...yeah") took the plunge (albeit in las vegas with my mom wearing a M*A*S*H t-shirt ). I am astounded by the extent to which (as Powers discusses) non-mainstreamy people go to create a marriage ceremony that is sort of alternative and personalized. It’s as if they know how deeply stupid marriage is and are apologizing for it by dressing in rocky horror characters, or Halloween costumes or quoting The Little Prince, or even having a vegan cake and playing Belle & Sebastian at the reception. No matter how much work you to do subvert the dominant paradigm in your everyday life, if you get married what
you are saying that you agree to everything your government and religion does and says. You are nodding your assent to business as usual in the world today, because the process by which you are convinced that your love, your sex life, the things that you hold most dear in life are somehow not real until the government OKs them is the same brainwashing by which we are led to believe that meat eating, earth-raping and all the rest of the shit that is POISONING OUR SOCIETY TODAY is FUCKING NATURAL. You can’t believe in one part of it without implicitly nodding your consent to ALL the rest of it. Everything is connected.
4) Gay and lesbian marriage: DUMBEST THING I’VE EVER HEARD OF! Of course as a liberal person I am in favor of gay people being legally allowed to marry, but the idea of it is just distasteful. Two gay guys, married? Doesn't it just turn your stomach? I mean, they're gay! I always thought gay people were the coolest people I knew, now everyone is off getting married and embracing the sick world I thought they happily shunned. Health care, blah blah. Being lesbian or gay is a Fucking Awesome Thing, and marriage is a Thing That Is Fucked, so why would you want to mix the two? Sure, if you are incredibly boring and also happen to be gay (it happens) and also
very mainstreamy, marriage is fine for you, because it just affirms the fact that you are part of the nastiness that surrounds us. If you are cool and happen to be queer, why get married? Let's just work on letting lesbians and gay men get married legally, then leave the distasteful subject alone.
Dan Savage (of the Savage Love sex column fame) says that "I think it embraces our oppression to say marriage is not a gay institution. It’s like saying law or medicine is a male profession because women were excluded from it. It’s not a gay institution because they don’t let us get married, not because there’s something inherently heterosexual about marriage." Well, OK, there’s nothing inherently heterosexual about marriage, there’s something inherently degrading and outdated and pointless about marriage. So forget what hetersexual idiots want to do and blaze your own path. I just can’t believe any gay person worth their rainbow flag would want to get married.
It's exactly the same problem i have with mainstream liberal feminists who just want women to become CEOs and everything. What the hell is the point of women just taking over society without changing it at all? I have zero interest in women becoming CEOs.
The other thing about gay marriage is that it hurts us straightish coupled people who choose not to get married for political reasons. Sooner or later, gay marriage will be legal everywhere, and of course I am for this. To deny anyone the right to get married would be unfair, obviously. I also don't think anyone should
listen to Avril Lavigne, but I'm not about to pass a law saying gay people can't listen to her. I just wish our society was such that we didn't want to do these silly things. Anyway, when marriage is legal for everyone, there will be no excuse for everyone not to get married, and thus no reason to grant rights to anyone who chooses not to get married. So, even though I am for it, gay marriage actually has the potential to hurt me in a very real way.
5) A wedding ceremony, by its very definition, **cannot be** cool. More from Ann Powers:
This just doesn’t make sense. You cannot "modify the rules of membership" to the marriage club, and WHO WANTS TO? If, as she argues so persuavely, it’s "a pledge to a set of stereotypes that don’t even apply to
most people’s real lives any more, but which inevitably affect the expectations and subsequent actions of those who accept them" (good point) – why even do it?
6) Some couples say they get married because they love each other, and want to proclaim this love to the world. My partner Jacob and I secretly laugh at these people. If you love each other so much, why do you need to prove it to everyone? Isn't your love enough? I understand the idea of a big party and all that, but marriage?? For good liberal political people? What does that institution have to do with love?
7) Marriage is really about - let's admit it - grabbing power. If you believe in the feminist idea that partiarchy is built on false ideas about power, marriage is an affirmation of the idea the we need to hoard power in order to get ahead.
I have been with Jacob for nearly 5 years now, and we don’t take each other for granted. He is my bestest friend and my sanity. We have never, ever discussed marriage. One thing we talk about often is not only not getting married, but the importance of not living as if we are married. This gets into waters known as "marriagefree," meaning that not only are we not married, we are actively and happily free of the concept of marriage in our lives.
I think about this a lot because I really, really, really hate the word "wife." I think I hate the word "blog"
almost as much, but not quite. Sometimes we need to be honest with ourselves, and when we are honest good feminists and listen to our inner voice, we know that the "wife" is a putdown that no amount of "radicalizing" can fix. Yes, many, many wives are not wifey, but we must admit to ourselves that once a couple is married, things are different and the temptation to be a wifey wife (and I know you know what I'm saying, so I won't bother to define it) is much greater than it was before.
I am in love with a man, but I am not fused to him, I am not tied to him. We live together but are apart often, and value our ability to be independent as much as we cherish our time together. We get a lot more done together, we have a lot more fun together, we are better people together, but we are also careful not to lean on each other to the point where we forget where I end and he begins. We celebrate our differences, and we celebrate our decision to be together. But there's no way we're going to cement our relationship my aligning ourselves with the entire socio-political-religious-governmental-corporate-tainment complex that we spend the rest of our lives fighting against.
August 2001
