For the past five years, at least, every time the subject of same sex marriage has come up, it has made me terribly uncomfortable. So what does that mean? Am I a right-winger from another era who thinks marriage should only be between one man and one woman? No. Do I think marriage is an antiquated institution? For the most part, yes. Marriage is about children and about money, and if you don't have either, well then....
In the 1980s, I was a college student majoring in Women's Studies. (I was in my 30s, in case anyone thinks they can't add.) In Women's Studies 101, which was for the most part full of straight women looking to define themselves outside the context of marriage and nuclear family building (or realizing that there was more to life than those things) we were told from the getgo: A marriage contract is the only contract in which the state tells you what the terms of the contract are. If you want to go into business with someone, for example, you can set the terms yourselves, as long as they are not illegal. In the 1980s many women were re-thinking marriage, monogamy, and the nuclear family. Those who had left all that actually looked up to Lesbians, because we had something different. We had a community. Romances came and went, cohabiting situations soured, but community remained. And often love - or at least friendship - remained. A woman could have a lifelong "significant other" (often a former lover) by which was meant everything from a healthcare proxy to the person you spent holidays with to the one person you knew you would want to save first if there was a Tsunami; but perhaps have another lover (or more than one), and yet a third person with whom she shared living quarters (not necessarily a dearly beloved, or even a particularly compatible friend, just someone who fell more or less at the same point she did on the neatness/not neatness scale).
This seemed to be the direction things were moving in, so.....
Yes, there were problems. If you wanted to have children (or if you already had them) there were legal issues if you couldn't marry. And if you had a lot of money, particularly if the person with the money was older and wanted to pass it along, tax-free, to her life partner, there were problems. And there was the pesky little problem of wanting to include your partner on your health insurance (never mind that this is a nonissue in countries with a single payer national health system). But there are many people to whom these things are simply not relevant.
I used to feel sorry for my single straight friends, who, as they aged, felt more and more like failures if they were into their 30s and hadn't yet found "the one". And of course "the one" had to be the perfect mix of sexually attractive and socially, intellectually, morally, and spiritually compatible, not to mention that you had to have the same taste in furniture, the same tolerance for noise, and the same limit for how long dirty dishes can stay in the sink. I felt blessed that I just didn't have to worry about those things. I could have a life rich in love and friendship, which included a small studio apartment that I could always bolt back to, lock the door, and be free of other people's opinions about how I should live in it when that's where I wanted to be.
Single straight women felt marginalized. As a quasi-coupled, quasi-single gay woman I did not.
So now of course, I am forced to revisit many things:
1. How did I end up with a significant other who never made a decent living and couldn't keep her surroundings clean?
2. If I had had any self-esteem wouldn't I have dumped her long ago and done the "Jane Austen" thing and found someone more, well, "marriageable"?
3. Is there something seriously wrong with me that I never could figure out how to "set up housekeeping" with someone? (I never thought there was anything wrong with me that I didn't want children, at least.)
Is the world really better now that all the shades of gray (sorry for the bad pun) have been removed from our spectrum of how to have relationships and love someone?
Obviously I can't wish we could turn back the clock on this whole marriage thing. (And I am truly, truly happy for the man who wanted to be listed as a "surviving spouse" in a way that I never was about Edie Windsor's half million.)
So I suppose it's really that there's a difference between being able to do something, and saying that's what people should be doing. In a free society, there are many things that people should be able to do, that it's still OK not to want to do. And that there's more to self-esteem than the perfect nuclear family.
ETA: I was feeling quite alone with this all day yesterday. Am feeling much better after seeing this article in today's TIMES.
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