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Lurid Archive
09:42 / 07.08.04
I'm still at the stage where I don't quite get the opposition to marriage, I'm afraid, but I thought I'd share a few thoughts on this

It seems to be very difficult, precisely because of this feeling that marriage is the natural or obvious next step, to articulate what marriage as it stands contributes to a relationship and how and why it does so. So if anyone can explain that to me, I'd be grateful. - Deva

What happens for the participants in a marriage ceremony? In my experience, striking a blow for heteronormativity is not a prime motivator. Rather, a couple decide to make a public committment which is legitimised, partly by being harder to break, by a recognised authority - religion and/or the state. On top of that, peers, family and friends lend pblic approval to the ceremony and, by extension, the choice of the bride and groom. What you have is community affirmation of the couple.

To be honest, the desire for this kind of approval strikes me as so naturally part of human nature that I'm not sure I can explain it further. Why does a writer want to be read? Partly vanity, partly money and partly to support capitalism (one might argue). But not entirely.

Of course, part of the complication arises out of expectation (and this is surely the same whenever one seeks recognition). If you are hetero and prepared to make a committment to another person, then it is understood that the way to make that is through marriage. Therefore, if you choose not to marry, you are in effect signalling that you aren't seeking that recognition. So you don't get it. You can obviously look for alternatives, but rate of success probably correlates with how closely the alternatives match up with a standard model of marriage.

Moving on,

Does anyone know anything about this? Is it being used to challenge anti-gay-marriage laws, for example? If not, why not??

I don't think so, but then the force of universal HR is only as strong as the willingness of nations to uphold them. As such, I think one could easily argue that article 16 supports the right for same sex marriage, but this is only relevant if someone is willing to make the argument. Even then, there are (IMHO) far more important rights which are ignored. You can essentially go down the list and think of violations of many of the articles. I always find the universal declaration to be both an uplifting and depressing read.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
22:48 / 08.08.04
I'll have a go, as your clear formulations here are pretty helpful, to me at least.

What happens for the participants in a marriage ceremony? In my experience, striking a blow for heteronormativity is not a prime motivator. Rather, a couple decide to make a public committment which is legitimised, partly by being harder to break, by a recognised authority - religion and/or the state. (my emphasis)

I agree on doubting that 'up the heteronorm' is a marriage motivator. I think it's yr second sentence is key here.

The legitimation by church and state is an utterly heterocentric one(state is recently beginning to alter in this repsect), and by engaging in marriage, you're benefiting from institutions that validate this hierachy.

On top of that, peers, family and friends lend pblic approval to the ceremony and, by extension, the choice of the bride and groom. What you have is community affirmation of the couple.

[...]

To be honest, the desire for this kind of approval strikes me as so naturally part of human nature that I'm not sure I can explain it further.

These are a factor in commitment ceremonies of all sorts. And no one in this thread appears to be arguing against commitment ceremonies.

I'm all for 'em, if folks feel that commitment.


But I can only stomach/uncomplicatedly rejoice* ones of a type that don't benefit from the church/state crossover, producing words like 'bride' and 'groom', and investing hetero/monogamous participants - as the only possible inhabitors of these labels in terms of community/state/church recognition - with power denied to others.




*i say this as some lovely people i know are gettting married, and I'm very happy that they find themselves in a loving and committed situation. As this is obviously what they want. So the friend in me rejoices to see 'em achieve it. And I of course wish to help them celebrate/affirm with their community, which I'm part of....

Whilst simultaneously feeling conflicted, as disaproving of the will-to-marriage/finding it, like Deva, inexplicable...

Any help?
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:47 / 09.08.04
The legitimation by church and state is an utterly heterocentric one(state is recently beginning to alter in this repsect), - bip

Do you mean that you would unreservedly accept marriage were it made available to all, regardless of sexual orientation (leaving aside polygamous issues for now)? That seems pretty reasonable, but doesn't quite square with your incomprehension. You probably have some further reservations, right?

and by engaging in marriage, you're benefiting from institutions that validate this hierachy.

By "institutions" here, you mean marriage? You can't mean the state, right? I think I'm missing something here.

More importantly, and this is a point I can't help returning to, how does this make marriage significantly different from other aspects of our lives? What about health, education, housing, employment, material and energy consumption, immigration and travel, human rights etc etc. If you are in one of the richest countries in the world, you are almost certainly benefitting from the racist and exploitative nature of the global economy and legal framework. If you are middle class, say, you are almost certainly benefitting from socio-economic inflexibility. If you are white...But, largely, you don't here people refusing to travel because of the racist privilege it entails, or refusing to go to Uni because of class and wealth. I could go on.

I suppose there is a very real distinction between a structural tendency and a legal prohibition. But its not a distinction that is totally compelling. I don't dismiss it, but I think that there are times when it isn't the prime consideration.

On top of that, I'm not sure what the actual benefits are, which are being referred to in marriage. Many of the material benefits are not at the *expense* of others and it is unclear how foregoing the right to immigrate with your partner, say, really helps anyone. Or am I being too literal? Is this more a symbolic benefit? Certainly the injustice in the current formulation of marriage is self-evident but, as above, I'm not sure that this really makes the act of marriage incomprehensible. Being het in and of itself confers certain benefits, but I'm not sure that has many direct consequences beyond the usual liberal ones.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:51 / 09.08.04
Well, yes. As marriage currently stands, participating in it is a bit like just happening to take advantage of the fact that some seats on the bus are designated for whites only. It's certainly possible to sit down without having as your primary objective the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, or indeed the desire to express an opinion either in favour of or against them. The fact remains, however, that you are getting a seat that someone else would not be able to use, and whether or not you are thinking "ah-hah! A chance for me to assert segregation!", you get to take the weight off either way.
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:26 / 09.08.04
As marriage currently stands, participating in it is a bit like just happening to take advantage of the fact that some seats on the bus are designated for whites only.

Sure. Or, for instance, like taking advantage of the internet.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:50 / 09.08.04
Not really... can you think of a situation in which somebody, let's start off in the UK, is disqualified from using the Internet on the grounds that they are, for example, gay? Yes, culture and capital, tum-te-tum - to use the Internet you need a plug, and a cable, and a PC and a modem and a working telephone infrastructure tum-te-tum. On the other hand, I see no restrictions applied to the people using Internet terminals in my local library.

I think your argument is a modified form of the "how can you waste time talking about x when the real enemy is capitalism?" gambit. Which is, unfortunately, a very easy way to avoid having to address anything, because it is too pressing that we battle capitalism with the power of our minds. However, recognising an injustice does not provide the right or the obligation to ignore any other injustice, simply because other well-meaning people do not want to give them priority. This is why different people have the option of directing themselves towards different causes, yes? So, one person can train seeing-eye dogs while nother works to get food to starving people and others again man helplines for the depressed. *Even within* a system which is maintained by inequality, it is still worth attempting to battle inequality. Being the lovechild of Mo and Sidney, I like to believe that it is posible that these struggles will ultimately reinforce each other.

However, deriding people's attempts to battle injustices that you just happen not to understand, on the grounds that they are smehow hypocrites for not addresses the injustices that you *do* understand strikes me as dirty pool.

On a tangent, perhaps we are getting closer to the centre of the question with this line:

I guess I've never thought all that deeply about it as it seemed a natural thing to do after all this time together as a couple/family

I'd like people to have a look at that statement and see how they respond to it, if they would.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
12:51 / 09.08.04
Lurid:

Okay, having looked at your comparisons, some of them work for me, some of them don't. You also seem, with them, to be setting up a somewhat amorphous 'liberal consensus gang' who make the same choices.

ok: you put marriage in a category with other facets of a modern capitalist '1st world' country thus:

More importantly, and this is a point I can't help returning to, how does this make marriage significantly different from other aspects of our lives? What about health, education, housing, employment, material and energy consumption, immigration and travel, human rights etc etc.

Most of us, unless we're alrady at the top of the capitalist tree, need to fund our lives. This means very little choice on being employed, on housing. If we're not able/don't support private healthcare, we have (just about) the NHS.

I fail to see how these neccessities are comparable to marriage. Marriage is not an imperative in the way housing/financial support/healthcare are. No-one has to get married, do they? Can you give me an example where marriage is as compulsory as work/finacial funding?


I'm able to spend time on this reply because, unable to participate in the ecomony to a degree that would support a basic adult life, a socialist principle - those who can supporting those who can't - provides me with an allowance. It's not huge, but i'm very glad of it.

Your examples of travel/energy consumption/human rights are more apt, I think. From our position of privelige, most of us can choose to engage with these issues or not.

And I'm not sure why you're so sure that lots of people aren't "refusing to travel because of the racist privilege it entails, " or becasue of the environmental cost of air travel. Many do. Or attempt to engage with these practices is what they see as 'more ethical ways' - eg ethical tourism/minimising plane travel.

And if people feel strongly enough about these issues, they can and do opt out/protest them. As many of us are here doing with marriage.

Also, in real life, one's own imperatives clash against each other/have to be belanced. One may need to travel across country/the world, but attempt to find the least destructive ways of doing so. Compromise/adjustment.

I think another of my squicks with marriage is that it is an all or nothing choice. You either do, or don't get married. And in doing so, you either do, or don't, as you've indicated benefit from financial/legal/social advantages/ally yourself to a dominant culture, or you don't.

And there's mayvbe what you're sesning extra to my objections to marriage. It's alliance to dominant capitalist and patriarchal cultures that i find deeply questionable.

No more or no less than say, the disparity of wages bewteen genders, or the decision by the Home Office to deny asylum seekrs and refugees whose appeals have been refused, access to vital HIV drugs. We can have threads and do, on these issues.

And I believe the named institution of 'marriage' is too deeply bound up with these structures to be acceptable.

If you open commitment and partnership options to all, regardless of sexuality, race, class, ability to pay (do you khow how much weddings cost?) or number of participating partners, I'll come dance at the wedding, so to speak.

And yes, I have the very simple squick that marriage is available for monogamous straights only. Which is discrimatory, and wrong. As per Haus' bus example.

Which still doesn't quite fit, because someone may have an imperative, say capitalist, to get across town, and may have to use that bus in the knowledge that they're shoring up a bigoted technology.

No-one has to get married.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:33 / 09.08.04
I guess I've never thought all that deeply about it as it seemed a natural thing to do after all this time together as a couple/family

My first impression: I think that's rather sickening. A lot of people in this country don't think about gender or marriage or anything and frankly they all need intensive counselling to combat their blind acceptance of the world.

I do understand marriage and I don't think it's a negative thing and the real problem isn't with marriage itself, despite it's religious history. Marriage is about the community and if you get married than you're exercising a privilege that has been given to you and it relates not simply to you individually but to the entire culture that you live in. Now some of us would like one day to be able to seek a type of acceptance from the state and our communities, simply because we're inclined to do so in much the same way that Nadia from BB wanted acceptance. Everyone wants to say 'this is who I am' and some people want that to extend to 'this is our unit'.

As has already been pointed out, the choice of who can marry should be much larger simply because homosexuality should be socially accepted. I really don't understand why gay and lesbian marriage hasn't been legalised, I'm certain I'll see it in my lifetime. Unlike BiP I don't think it's too bound up in institutions, I don't think marriage itself is the problem here, I think that the idiots who populate this country (and makes the rules) are.

It's alliance to dominant capitalist and patriarchal cultures that i find deeply questionable

As do I but frankly these are the kinds of things that you can change over time, you don't stop the racial seating toss by banning buses, you just change the rules. What we need is a huge cultural movement. As usual.
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:18 / 09.08.04
I think your argument is a modified form of the "how can you waste time talking about x when the real enemy is capitalism?" gambit.

Not really. Or at least I don't intend it that way. Rather, it seems to me that the arguments against marriage in this thread seem to rest entirely on pointing out the injustice of the current set up, as if that were the end of the discussion. It isn't, because we don't accept that as being the end of the argument in a whole host of other situations (some of my examples work better than others, admittedly).

I'm all with you in trying to change the current set up. But there is a difference between seeing marriage laws as unjust and failing to comprehend how anyone can ever contemplate being sullied by the institution. A pretty big difference, that seems to place marriage in a fairly exceptional category. Hence the analogies.

However, deriding people's attempts to battle injustices that you just happen not to understand, on the grounds that they are smehow hypocrites for not addresses the injustices that you *do* understand strikes me as dirty pool.

Thats a little unkind. Is my opposition to discriminatory laws being lost in my attempt to point out that there are some redeeming features of marriage? I don't mean to insult anyone, I'm more interested in being convinced about why I shouldn't treat marriage and education, say, in a broadly similar fashion.

No-one has to get married, do they? Can you give me an example where marriage is as compulsory as work/finacial funding? - bip

Good point. Immigration, child custody, famly approval etc aren't necessities, certainly. You can do without. But, to turn your question on its head, clearly you don't think it is compulsary for men to earn salaries in excess of the male median wage. But aren't we content with reform of gender disparities of income in that situation?

Maybe Haus is right, that this kind of comparison only serves to defend the indefensible by contrasting it with something worse. But I do think a certain kind of shortcut is ocurring, where it is presented as self evident that one should oppose, rather than try to change, marriage. I'm with Anna de L on this, I think.
 
 
Cat Chant
18:03 / 09.08.04
But there is a difference between seeing marriage laws as unjust and failing to comprehend how anyone can ever contemplate being sullied by the institution. A pretty big difference, that seems to place marriage in a fairly exceptional category.

Okay, that's interesting - more interesting than I think my response does justice to - though I think you're misunderstanding my lack of comprehension: it's not that I can't 'comprehend how anyone can ever contemplate being sullied by the institution'; what I've been asking about in the last few posts is why people get married. I can't see what people get out of it that overrides what seems to me to be a glaring gap between the legal institution of marriage as it stands and what people either say (they want to affirm their relationship publicly: they can do that without getting married) or do (get divorced). Most of the people who are talking from their own experience see it as so obvious as to be inexplicable, which... well, which just means they can't explain it, so I still can't understand it. That inexplicability is sort of interesting in itself, actually, given that so many people here can be passionate and articulate about why they like Buffy or why they've chosen to live in the city they live in, so that even where my tastes, politics or economic situation don't coincide with theirs I can get an understanding of what they're on about.

Incidentally, this question:

Does anyone know anything about this? Is it being used to challenge anti-gay-marriage laws, for example? If not, why not??

was similarly a request for information: is anyone willing to make the argument? I mean, there are globally more important things than the rights of 16yo English boys to have sex with other boys, but the UK was still taken to the European Court of Human Rights over it. (I'm still interested, btw - does anyone know whether anyone is campaigning for gay marriage on the basis of the UN Declaration?)

And finally, three brief formulations of my objections to marriage as it stands, one simple, one more complicated, and one for the road:

(1) I just don't think you should support systems that legally discriminate against people. I would try not to use an all-white bus, as in Haus's example.

(2) As you say, If you are hetero and prepared to make a commitment to another person, then it is understood that the way to make that is through marriage. Therefore, if you choose not to marry, you are in effect signalling that you aren't seeking that recognition. So you don't get it.

That is, marriage has a certain recognized status. Now, marriage has that status because it is restricted: only certain types of relationships qualify; not all relationships seek or want the kinds of recognition that marriage confers (visitation rights in hospital, for example). And I don't think it's legitimate - I don't think it makes any sense - to say that because to you, marriage means "committed long-term publicly declared relationship", the rest of its legal meanings - heterosexual monogamy being the biggest one, but there are also implications for financial and co-parenting arrangements - are just contingent. If you are choosing marriage because it says something about your relationship - that it's more committed or more deserving of public recognition than a non-married relationship, as in your explanation that I quoted - you are also, without having any choice in the matter, choosing something which says that your relationship is more deserving of public recognition than a gay or a poly relationship. You can't pick and choose which bits of marriage you're going to do. And that's the problem with it.

Basically, what the term "marriage" does is equivocate between "a desire to affirm a commitment publicly" and "the parcel of rights, privileges and exclusions that is legal marriage". So the basis on which I object to marriage is pretty simple: it passes off a particular legal-cultural protocol which benefits a privileged group in society as "natural and universal" and defends it as if it were in fact natural and universal.

(3) The 'community' thing falls down, for me, because my community includes queers and polygamists. So, even if I were in a monogamous relationship with an opposite-sex person which I wanted to have affirmed by the community in a ceremony, choosing a form of commitment ceremony which explicitly privileges heterosexual monogamy and which is explicitly not available for homosexual or poly relationships, to me, is... counter-intuitive, to say the least. Why would I want to express the significance of my relationship in a manner which explicitly denies equal significance to the relationships of the people in the community whose blessing I'm seeking?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
18:59 / 09.08.04
Deva: great post, and thanks, articulates much of what I find troubling about marriage specifically.

oh, and having read your post, it's made me think about something I said above:

Your examples of travel/energy consumption/human rights are more apt, I think. From our position of privelige, most of us can choose to engage with these issues or not

And perhaps marriage is a choosing not to be engaged with issues around patriarchy, heteronormativity, equality for non-heteromonogamous folk.

An 'it's not my problem' so it's nothing to do with my personal choices? There's a sense in which Lurid's comment here

guess I've never thought all that deeply about it as it seemed a natural thing to do after all this time together as a couple/family

really makes me queasy as well. As it contains for me a sense of this 'it's not my problem'/unexamined quality. (which btw, is not one I associate with you at all, so perhaps my overriding feeling on reading that is surprise.)

It makes me want to ask questions:

What's natural about marriage? About relationships being between men and women? Or being only bewtween two people?

IMO, you're conflating 'common'/'dominant'/'accepted' with natural. Which is a word that gives me the heeby-jeebies, as it's used so often a technology of repression.

See also the 80s Conservatives' 'family values'/back to basics rhetoric, and TOny Blairs 'crime is the fault of the abnormal/permissive 60s'.

Or free market economics, and its insistence on it being as simple as 'you get what you set out to get'/assumption of a level playing field.




On explanations of marriage:

When I hesitatingly asked my sis about this when she and my bro got engaged, she said something along the lines of:

'he asked me, I love him and want to spend the rest of my life with him. it's just about us. *Our* marriage isn't about him being in charge, or me taking his name(she didn't), or any of that stuff.'

Which, Lurid, is I guess what you're saying, that people who get married are making their own version of marriage, one which may well object to any of the practices I've highlighted.

But for me, that 'refusal to engage' is deeply difficult to deal with. I don't get any choice about dealing with these issues.

And I'm bi, and lets say, undecided on polyamory, so it's possible that I'll meet and wish to spend the rest of my life with one man. In a situation which would be perfectly 'marriageable'. So actually I could seek out/consider marriage, legally speaking.

But to do that would mean turning my back on so much of me, politically, personally, pyschologically. I can't imagine it.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
19:04 / 09.08.04
But thanks for your delineation of the 'changing marriage' question. And to Anna De. Wanna have a think about that and come back.
 
 
Lurid Archive
19:46 / 09.08.04
There's a sense in which Lurid's comment here

guess I've never thought all that deeply about it as it seemed a natural thing to do after all this time together as a couple/family

really makes me queasy as well.

errrmmm. You realise that wasn't me, right? Queasiness displacement duty signing out.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
20:27 / 09.08.04
margghh. I am sorry about that. misread Haus' post.

And I should have known better.

queasyness not displaced, but redirected.
 
 
Persephone
14:37 / 10.08.04
I guess I've never thought all that deeply about it as it seemed a natural thing to do after all this time together as a couple/family

My response: It didn't seem natural to me. What it was to me was scripted. I feel very half-in and half-out of this question about marriage. I mean, I'm basically a girl who likes boys. So there's little in me that would work against the dominant scripts that get handed to you & you might not even be aware that this is a script. And that it's a script that just happens to agree with your basic instincts. So it seems "natural" to you.

But for some reason I did become aware that it was a script, and I think it was because I don't want to have children. Which is another dominant script, only this went against my instincts. This reminds me of something that I think that Ex said about being queer & the discomfort that people have about that & I think it was that once you move one boundary, you challenge the very idea of boundaries? So it was like this sliver of light, that I wasn't going to have children ever...

...but it's not like these scripts just fold up & put themselves away. I got to the point where I could see that this was a script that I was acting out. But I wasn't far enough along to stop myself from acting it out. Radix and I had been together for seven years, you know, without a thought of getting married. It seems to me that there was a definite moment when the din about us getting married went up that notch & after we got married, the din went away. Which was a miracle for a while, but I'm sorry that I did it. Because then there was a little din about us having kids & I said very flatly no, and the little din went away. And I think I could have done that about marriage, too.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:39 / 10.08.04
Ooh. Thanks. scripted is really interesting, and starts making sense to me. (Aside: I wonder whether a lot of my take on marriage comes from reading Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground when I was a teen: she has always thought of a future in which she gets married, works for a couple of years, then has kids and stays home to look after them: "it was a movie of my future, and it was a very pleasant movie and it was unconnected to me". One of those lines that started making all sorts of unexamined scripts/movies visible to me.)

I feel bad about having been so vociferously anti-marriage on this thread, because I am genuinely interested in why people get married on a personal/pragmatic level, and I think I've probably closed down the space in which people could have talked about that by being ? aggressive? Or at least coming across in a way where my question "Why do people get married?" sounds like "Why would anyone contemplate sullying themselves with this?" And I'm very grateful to you, Persephone, because I'm aware that when you're handed a script that matches your own... inclinations, or life-situation, or whatever, it is difficult to be aware that it's a script and not just 'the natural next step' (see, that makes more sense to me now, as well).

It's also not like I think all scripts are bad - though, actually, I hate coming-out narratives and consider them almost as exclusionary as marriage scripts, so maybe I do have a bit of a knee-jerk thing about scripts... But you can't make everything up from scratch, as it were, and it's useful to have some sorts of templates, so everyone knows where you stand. (My gf and I were talking about marriage last night, and one of the non-legal advantages we could think of was that everyone knew they had to invite your spouse to "family" things, or whatever: it's a marker of the place of the partner in the scheme of things.)

I'll tell you the way I was making sense of marriage in my head - actually, it came about from thinking about Lurid's marriage/academia analogy in this very thread. Okay, so the reason that I stay in academia is because, for better or for worse, there are capacities within me that can only be fulfilled within that bad institution. I've thought about getting a day job and writing theory books by night, but I've watched my practice and so much of what I do and think is fuelled by chance encounters in corridors, turning up at random seminars because I happened to be on campus, transcribing lectures I didn't attend for cash, listening to people rant about something they've read - just being around, on a day-to-day and practical level, a community of people who think in roughly the same terms as me. So I've made a decision to contribute to a bad and unfair system because, on the whole, I think people should fulfil their unique capacities, and so should I (actually, this is another basic human right in the UN Declaration: Article Sixteen: Everyone... is entitled to realization... of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.).

I guess what I'm interested in is - what are those capacities that can't be fulfilled outside marriage? What does marriage enable for people, and how?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
01:26 / 11.08.04
I can't see what people get out of it that overrides what seems to me to be a glaring gap between the legal institution of marriage as it stands and what people either say (they want to affirm their relationship publicly: they can do that without getting married) or do (get divorced).

But Deva I think you're missing your own point- it's the dominant type of relationship in our society. You recognise that, so look at it not logically but psychoanalytically and your answer is there.

And I think that when Persephone says: I think it was that once you move one boundary, you challenge the very idea of boundaries is very important but alas not the case for a lot of people- if they legalise gay marriage I'm sure there will be a lot of couples who go for it because it's the dominant ideology. You get together, decide you want to stay, get married. Of course they're not really pushing their own boundaries, simply societal ones so perhaps it's all in the detail and there is a rule there. Ergh.

It sounds ridiculous that people do things all the time because they're the thing to do but it's the only thing that explains my pet hate- the number of women who change their surnames. I mean, really that's what I can't understand, marriage is fine but you can really go too far with this cultural acceptance thing. There's a difference between unity and property.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
07:45 / 11.08.04
there was a definite moment when the din about us getting married went up that notch & after we got married, the din went away. Which was a miracle for a while, but I'm sorry that I did it. Because then there was a little din about us having kids & I said very flatly no, and the little din went away. And I think I could have done that about marriage, too

Ooh. that's fascainting, Persephone. (or should we call you 'Mrs.Radix'? )

Do you think you can say anything more about why the din got a a pressure pitch? Was it to do with the longevity of your relationship, a feeling that once you've been together x years and are pretty sure you want to stasy together, that's when the marriage script becomes less a guidelines and more an (insistent) formality? Or thinkgs like living/houseowning together...

Or maybe it's to do with age of participants? Thinking about my own relationships and those of people around me, marriage and/or life-partnership seem to be much more 'in the air' than they were, say five years ago. And yep, this is very much tied into the kids script/'biological clock' stuff.

And this one, like all the others is definitely subject to other factors, eg class. Eg, growing up, there were plenty of people for whom the marriage script entered the picture in late teens, whereas now, when I'd say that my social circles are vastly more middle-class, it's been much the other way round.

eg some friends who got married at about 24 feeling odd/'is it too early/no-one else is doing it', about the whole affair...

And had an interesting cultural clash within their own circles. In that E's very working class family couldn't see why she'd waited soooo long and were relieved she'd finally done it, whereas M's very middle-class family were where somewhat dubious, putting pressure against following the marriage script to it's conclusion at that time. (which was partiuclarly interesting as M's dad is a vicar, and so is generally pretty much on the side of marriage.)
 
 
Cat Chant
08:41 / 11.08.04
people do things all the time because they're the thing to do

But those are the sort of things that are interesting to explain!

Though this is tallying neatly with my girlfriend's take on the whole affair ("It is as the Rolling Stones said: you just get married 'cos there's nothing else to do...").
 
 
Loomis
10:31 / 11.08.04
I agree with a lot of what BiP and Deva have been saying, but one big objection I have to marriage is this: Why should we/the church/the state/etc. grant any legitimacy to a monogamous het relationship that is no different to any other monogamous het relationship? Most het peole have more than one serious and/or non-serious romantic relationships in their lives. The fact that they simply choose one of these to be legitimized/recognized/etc. by a marriage ceremony rather than another of their relationships, and at any time they can choose to dissolve the marriage and then continue to have other romantic relationships, and even choose to demand legitimcay of another relationship five minutes later, seems to me to redner the whole concept of marriage meaningless. Unless it's a uniting of two virgins who stay together until death, forsaking all others, etc., then what does marriage mean? If most of the original criteria for marriage have been worn away, then how can anyone cling to some spurious "tradition" of marriage whereby it is only available to monogamous het couples? Every single part of the marriage vow is optional as far as I can see, so how can it confer any sort of status on someone for going through with it?

The marriage vow bugs me no end. If I swore to stay with someone forever no matter what, I would be lying. What I would really mean is, I'll stay with you if you don't cheat on me, if you don't steal all my money and burn our house down and smother my children, if you don't become a neo-nazi, if we simply don't like each other any mroe and are fighting all day and night, etc. I could never make a vow that would be such a lie, and therefore I would not claim such legitimacy for a relationship that is not my first, and although I dearly hope it will be my last, I know that there are conditions that we have set for each other in order for this relationship to work.

Furthermore, why should any romantic relationship be any more legitimate than all the other relationships in my life, with friends, colleagues, my doctor, my dentist, etc. In the eyes of the law, and in the eyes of society, i think we should all be viewed as individuals at all times. You may choose to share your home and your money and your aspirations with a partner or partners, but I don't see why it should confer anything on you socially. If your community doesn't respect your decision to bind yourself to one person (for however long) without marriage, then surely that points to a problem in society regarding the lack of respect for individuals, and perhaps we should be asking what it is about the makeup of our society that demands easily identifiable relationship units? Why is someone in a relationship (married or otherwise) considered more worthy? I can see the benefits in times gone by to easily recognize friend or foe and to bind yourself to a particular family or clan or whatever, but surely such thinking is behind us?
 
 
Loomis
10:34 / 11.08.04
I really need to stop writing endless strings of questions. I have become Carrie Bradshaw.
 
 
Cat Chant
11:01 / 11.08.04
what it is about the makeup of our society that demands easily identifiable relationship units?

Well, though I think I'm mostly sympathetic to you in terms of the weirdness of privileging one recognizable model of relationships which bundles together a ton of not-(perhaps)-intrinsically-related things (financial, coparenting, cohabiting, affective, sexual, romantic...), I think there has to be some sort of trade-off with 'easily identifiable'. That is, I would be much happier with a far more flexible legal and social model, but all this talk of the uniqueness of each individual's relationship with each other individual, while true and laudable in many situations, doesn't get you very far when deciding who... looks after the kids when one partner dies; gets disposal of the body and charge of funerary arrangements ditto; inherits the house ditto; gets hospital visitation rights; gets invited to which parties and/or events with which other partner or set of partners; comes to Parent-Teacher night at school; takes responsibility when the police ring to say they've picked up the kid... In a lot of stressful situations, it's nice to have the wheels oiled a bit by an easily recognizable vocabulary of relationships, which is what marriage provides, even though that vocabulary, as you point out, bears little or no relation to the concrete arrangements and affective relationships in many (I would guess most) people's real lives.
 
 
Loomis
11:18 / 11.08.04
I guess the sort of solution I would be thinking of would be for the person to designate these relationships themselves, like writing a will. Perhaps at the age of 18, say, everyone would be required to fill in a form designating your person to be notified in case of emergency, person to whom your estate should go to, who you would like to look after your kids, etc. Likewise if a couple has kids, they could fill in a similar form drawing up who has responsibility for certain things. This could all be saved in a central database so that there would be no confusion as to the wishes of the person in question.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
11:37 / 11.08.04
(offtopic: I have become Carrie Bradshaw.. Does that make Ariadne Big?)

Ok, back on. Thanks Loomis, for unearthing something else I find annoying about marriage. Given that in the UK 1 in 3 marriages ends in divorce, it's always seeemed a bit grim for people to insist on, or recieve through marriage (and perhaps this is an important distinction) greater validation for the relationships than non-married folk. I know I do it myself, my first impulse is to presume a married coule are 'serious' and it takes me a beat to wonder how long they've been married, if their marriage is a good one...

Perhaps there's something in the specific objectifying marriage performs. A 'marriage' (Jeeesus. I've typed that word so many times it's beginning to look insane. Maybe that's how we queer marriage ) is a different object to a (romantic)'relationship'.

eg .Can we concieve of a marriage that doesn't last till 'death us do part' as successful?
 
 
Persephone
16:45 / 11.08.04
Why should we/the church/the state/etc. grant any legitimacy to a monogamous het relationship that is no different to any other monogamous het relationship?

See the strange thing is, the thing that makes marriage different from any other monogamous het relationship ~is~ that we/church/state grant this legitimacy. It's self-validating. People always say that it's just a piece of paper, but to me that's like saying that something is just a metaphor. I just read this thing --slightly off-topic-- that proposes that metaphor is what enables consciousness, you know? So it isn't about how the idea --or idea expressed in language-- matches with actuality. In a sense, idea ~is~ actuality. As for stuff like "until death do us part," that's just language. I don't mean to sound cavalier... but of course this is one of the privileges that het couples have, that they don't require specificity in this case. But what I'm saying is, language is always incomplete. There's always unspoken stuff in a cloud around what gets said --the equivocation is built in, in my opinion.
 
 
Persephone
16:57 / 11.08.04
I did refer to Radix forever as "Husb," if you remember? There was something funny behind that, but then we met videodrome in New York last summer & he addressed Radix as "Mr. Munt." And within a week Radix had picked himself his own name.

Do you think you can say anything more about why the din got a a pressure pitch?

There was this horrible ...chart in Shape magazine this month, about milestones that you have to reach to be perceived as grown up. Apart from the overall concept, the ages assigned seemed shockingly ~young~ to me. But anyway... I mean, we had moved back to Chicago. He had given up his dissertation, I had given up on my novel & now we were going to be grown up and get jobs. It had to be part of that. Like we were done with screwing around & being kids, and now we were going to get on with the serious business of living. Like a wedding as a coming-out party (in the debutante sense, not the gay sense).
 
 
Persephone
17:00 / 11.08.04
And I think that when Persephone says: I think it was that once you move one boundary, you challenge the very idea of boundaries is very important but alas not the case for a lot of people- if they legalise gay marriage I'm sure there will be a lot of couples who go for it because it's the dominant ideology.

No doubt, you see this all the time. People usually want to move the boundary just enough to include themselves --e.g., gay people for whom bisexuals are just too outre. Etc, etc, etc.
 
 
Persephone
17:03 / 11.08.04
I guess what I'm interested in is - what are those capacities that can't be fulfilled outside marriage? What does marriage enable for people, and how?

This is really an extremely good question & I'm trying to think of a good answer...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
17:35 / 11.08.04
then what does marriage mean?

It's the choice that makes it significant. There are so many things that we can't choose to do in this society- I mean you can choose to streak down the street but you'll get arrested for it. If you do want to distinguish your relationship from all of those other relationships that you've had than surely the thing to do is to choose to culturally affirm that relationship by getting married. And it's the clauses that you apply that make marriage a contract between people and the state, I suppose that's why they won't extend rights to unmarried couples.

So if marriage is a cultural contract before the state and you vow certain things- forsaking all others blah blah blah than the point is that you can rip it up. That doesn't make its meaning less significant at the time that you write it. Neither does that detract from the point that all people should have that choice. You see I think the basic meaning behind marriage as it should exist today is pretty sound on an individual and cultural basis. I don't see why we shouldn't demand state recognition of our choices and I don't see why it's a bad thing to elevate one particular relationship of your own in the eyes of the state. Unfortunately this practice needs to be treated for what it is. I think our problem here is an awareness that people don't view it on the terms that it actually exists as a practical institution. I think that it's seen as a thing that props up notions of family values and is actually very exclusionary but that's because our state isn't what we want it to be, not because marriage is necessarily an awful creature. As soon as you dismiss the religious background and link it to something else the whole idea makes sense and we can't ignore the fact that religion and the governance of our nation were once very entwined.

I just want to know what the problem with seeking state and cultural recognition is? I know that we all do it without exception and I think that's the fundamental reason for marriage and without institutions like it we just wouldn't have a working culture at all.
 
 
Loomis
17:45 / 11.08.04
I just want to know what the problem with seeking state and cultural recognition is?

For me I think it's more the state recognition that bothers me. For example, when you turn 18 (or 16 for some things I guess) you acquire certain powers as an adult. Some people celebrate that moment with a party, which is the cultural aspect. But you still get the rights regardless of whether you throw a party and regardless of whether your community sanctions it by attending your party. I would like to see marriage likewise separated. If you want to have a party with your friends to celebrate your committment then that's fine, but there should not be any change to your legal status. We should all be single entities in the eyes of the state.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:30 / 11.08.04
I don't think the party's necessary though- 15 minutes in a registry office and even unmarried you'd probably have to go through 15 minutes of time to arrange your rights as they relate to other people. I mean, you're being a little unrealistic I suspect, we're not alone in this world, what about next of kin status etc.?
 
 
Persephone
19:46 / 11.08.04
So if marriage is a cultural contract before the state and you vow certain things- forsaking all others blah blah blah than the point is that you can rip it up. That doesn't make its meaning less significant at the time that you write it. Neither does that detract from the point that all people should have that choice.

I'm in total agreement with this. The fact that you can rip up a piece of paper in the future doesn't reach back into the present & make that not-paper now. Actually, I'm a little bit interested in the violence implied in ripping up the paper --but whatever. In any case, I don't think that any act of creation is invalidated by the possibility --or even the probability-- that it won't last forever. Perhaps it's not that I will feel this way always (length), it's that I feel this much now (height) --as in Disco's example.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:43 / 12.08.04
I just want to know what the problem with seeking state and cultural recognition is?

Well, this goes back to the double meaning of marriage, as (a) the registration of certain legal-financial/next-of-kin/co-parenting arrangements with the state in such a way as to have a certain level of cultural recognizability/ familiarity, so that you don't have to go through a twenty-minute explanation in stressful situations (and most situations when it matters who your next of kin is are stressful), and (b) marriage as it stands. I guess, for me, the problem with marriage is that its exclusionary nature means that if you want state and cultural recognition for a relationship, you are forced to seek it on a basis which excludes... well, which excludes, for me, what I would want recognized and the people I would want it recognized by.
 
 
Persephone
13:23 / 13.08.04
I can't think of anything, Deva. I can't think of anything analogous to staying in academia "because, for better or for worse," --ha, ha-- "there are capacities within me that can only be fulfilled within that bad institution." When I think about my capacities, I'm thinking in professionial terms. I have no goals as a wife. If anything, being married undistracts me from personal relationships & personal relationships don't become my life's work. I realize that this is not how marriage has always been. I mean, I'm assuming that marriage didn't originally function to ensure that women would be able to focus on their careers; but I make it function like that. Maybe as marriage becomes less of a house to be entered & more like, I don't know, an appliance... maybe that would remove more of the objections on both sides of the aisle, so to speak.
 
 
grant
13:46 / 13.08.04
Yeah, it sure as hell simplifies one's life. For better and for worse.
 
  

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