On nerdmeyr.com, K wrote a very personal piece about her attitudes on
marriage. This inspired a wave of comments on the blog, and a wave of
thoughts in my own head. Like mph, I decided that it wouldn’t be
right to fill so much space (disk space?) on their blog with all I
wanted to say, so here it goes.

I’m joining the conversation late here, but hopefully I’ve got a
perspective worth the (frightening amount of) text I’m (probably)
about to produce.

I’ve never been a believer in marriage. By this I do not mean
anything like: “people shouldn’t get married, it’s wrong.” I mean
something more like: “people seem to be seeing something here that I’m
not seeing. To me I’m seeing two people in a committed loving
relationship, and that was the case before the wedding, and that will
be the case after. So, like, what am I missing?”

But, of course, there is something. I really like mph’s
characterization of the typical marriage as a “tangled mess of
sacrament, state license/regulation and social event”. I’m personally
not in to sacrament either (although ceremony can be excellent if well
done… and brief). The state license/regulation part is obviously
important, but as mph again suggests, if that’s all it were about, it
should be more like getting a driver’s license. So, the only thing
that really stands out to me as emotionally compelling is the social
event, and for all the money and energy that goes in to most weddings,
I can’t believe how poor many of them rank in this department.

So, I’ve wondered for years, why do people get married? Being the
casually scientific-minded person that I am, I embarked on a project
about 15 years ago. I decided that every time a friend told me that
they were planning on getting married, I would ask the simple
(but unusually unasked) question: “why?” Some of the responses have been humorous, some
bleak, often both at the same time. But most of *these* answers could
be recharacterized by me simply as “we believe in marriage”. That is,
they see the thing that I don’t see, and they want it.

This is probably true of most people who get married, but most my
friends are focused on something other than that thing I can’t see. A
friend who got married last year responded that he wanted to bring the
people important to him and his love together to have fun and devote
some of their social energy to a recognition of their relationship.
In other words, (and I’m sorry I can’t remember his exact words), he
was less focused on the being married, and more focused on the event
of the wedding. The social event, in other words, with a good dose of
sacrament thrown in there as well. It was a good wedding.

But his answer was also unusual. More friends have responded citing
matters clearly focused on the legal side. I believe that some
variation on “we want to have kids, and this makes things easier” is
the most common response. I know more than one couple for whom the
issue is/was about the employer-sponsored health care. I know more
than one couple who got married because they were from different
countries and this allowed them to stay together. What all of these
answers have in common from my perspective is: they make sense.
Whereas I can’t see this magic marriage thing that so many people seem
to see, these pragmatic issues are crystal-clear.

To K’s original message, then (finally), I also find myself a bit
less-than-inspired about advocating for gay marriage. I mean, I’m
whole-heartedly in support of it, if for no other reason than that I
believe that gays should be treated equally under the law. But, not being all that excited about marriage, it’s hard to get excited about allowing more people to get married. This is even more true for me since I know many gay couples who are married, as far as I’m concerned, in every sense except the legal. So the
specifics that are immediately compelling to me are these pragmatic
issues: why can’t gays achieve these same legal ends? In some cases they can but
it’s vastly more complicated and disaster-prone (e.g. wills), but in other cases there’s no way
possible (e.g. immigration). This inequity offends me deeply.

Having said that, though, to say that pragmatic inequities are
“eroding” in recent history would be an understatement. To take the
most striking example, many straight couples are getting married to
qualify for health benefits that their gay peers qualify for by
cohabitating. This is an odd twist on inequity, but I don’t begrudge
the employers for it. Indeed, to me I read this policy as a de facto
recognition of gay marriage: the company basically saying “we’d like
to offer this benefit to legally married people because that will
minimize the potential for abuse. But we recognize that a lot of our
valued employees can’t get legally married, so we’re changing our
rules to reflect what we think the rules of society should be.” Of
course, in most cases, the companies don’t care about gay rights or
anything, they just want to be able to attract and retain good
employees. In this analysis, a gay person who quits a job to take
another that would cover their domestic partner is contributing
substantially to the advancement of pragmatic equity between gay and
straight couples, by sending their former employer the message “if you
want people like me, you’d better change your policies more to our
liking.” And, whatever’s happened, the change has been dramatic.
According to glbtq.com, the first domestic partnership benefits in the
United States were granted by the Village Voice in 1982. As of 2003,
over 5000 private employers (including nearly 200 of the Fortune 500)
and hundreds of governmental and educational institutions offer them.
In 20 years the practice went from unheard-of to standard, a rate of
social change rivaled perhaps only by child safety seats.

Anyway, I don’t see that a straight couple who gets married to
obtain this kind of benefit is in any way working against greater equity
between gays and straights. It’s not obvious how to extend
this line of inquiry into the realm of legal issues surrounding child
rearing. But I would certainly say that any rallying-cry for straight
couples who want to have children to, in solidarity with gay couples
who cannot here-and-now legally get married, not get married (or to
not have children) would be ludicrous.

But, if I understand her correctly, K is not even
advocating for a particular action, and in particular not for couples
to reject getting married when it makes sense for them to do so for some reason. Her
“So, what to do?” doesn’t seem to get answered except for the
proclamation about wedding gifts (which definitely seems like a good
kind of advocacy to me!). Rather, I believe she is wishing that we
were talking more about creating new conceptions of kinship instead of
just trying to make the old straight one available to gay couples as
well. Now THIS is compelling to me! And, the obvious first question I’d like to ask K
is: what ideas do you have for new conceptions of kinship? Having
very consciously built my approach to romantic relationships on a
philosophy of creativity, and now (some 15 years later) happily a
member of a community of people who are all interested in these kinds
of issues, I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on the matter. But
I suspect your thoughts on that matter would deserve their own blog
post if not their own book, so however curious I am, I’m not expecting a
quick reply.

I do think that K and I disagree sharply on one point: I do believe that “queer
culture and marriage can co-exist in some sort of mutually tolerant
arrangement” in a society. Perhaps I don’t know what she means by queer culture.
Perhaps also she means that they cannot co-exist in one particular
relationship (a very different conjecture). But I certainly think that a culture can support plenty
of diversity for different kinds of loving relationships. To me, to
say that such a thing couldn’t exist without “dismantling conventional
forms” of relationships is to display a lack of creativity and to
pretty well doom the project to failure. Dismantling marriage would
be a gargantuan change to society, and even if I knew how to go about
it, I wouldn’t do it. People who believe in marriage are welcome to
get married as far as I’m concerned, and all I ask in return is that
they respect my freedom to explore love and kinship in the ways that I
choose to.

K’s argument against this coexistence seems to be primarily that people
“grossly underestimate the influence of legal and social structures on
individual behavior”. Agreed, but you can’t get around that influence
(although you could be more aware of it). There are always going to
be laws, and there are even more definitely always going to be social
structures, and whatever they are, they are going to influence us all.
This doesn’t bother me, I celebrate diversity, and one kind of
diversity is when the culture around me believes in things I don’t.
Indeed, one kind of influence is presenting a well-defined target to
react against. What are the things we don’t like about modern
kinship? Could we structure our relationships differently? Do we
want to keep any of them?

Putting this more concretely, there are presently thousands and
thousands of households in the United States that are housing families
that are undeniably different from traditional marriages, and I’m not
including in that figure gay couples who want to be married the same
way straight people are married, nor single-parent households. Rather I mean families who defy
conventions: polyamorous families, uncommon living arrangements, etc.
But in this same country live some of the most patriarchal, insular, nuclear
family structures that have ever existed. Certainly it’s a lot more
difficult for the non-traditional families to make everything work,
but that doesn’t mean they aren’t co-existing. They are very
literally co-existing right now.

Please forgive me (and correct me) if I am misreading you, K, but you
seem to be advocating for a different paradigm. I believe that the
paradigm never precedes the real in cases such as these. New
paradigms are created (and are being created even as I type) by people
actually being creative and living their life to their own ideals, as
best as they can. All that is necessary for this to take place is
freedom. And, even for all of the ways in which the laws of our land
fail to recognize us all equally, we arguably have as much legal,
social, and economic freedom as any people ever have. So, let’s put it to good use, and get
to work creating new types of kinship, yeah?