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Tryphena Absent
09:14 / 03.10.03
It strikes me that Anna's 'doesn't everyone want a wedding' is a *very* female perspective, she phrases it in terms of the big dress etc...

Actually I think it's more the party, to be honest I've never had an urge to actually walk down the aisle (yuk, people staring at you and lying about how good you look) but having everyone in the same place at the same time really appeals. Drinking like a fish to really bad music that you liked when you were a 12 year old and watching everyone else and laughing! I also have a thing for massive cultural events, I enjoyed Diana's funeral, I find David Blaine's stunt absolutely amazing, a wedding is the event that you caused.

And some people don't want to do that? Each to their own I guess.

the only relationship/personal situation within which it's acceptable to procreate, then the way that marriage acts upon the female subject is going to be vastly different upon the male.

I think that to a certain extent marriage probably binds men more- though only very recently- women have natural bonds and a natural balancing act to perform. Should you bear a child you are tied to it, marriage exists as a social trap, in a patriachal society it makes it clear that the child belongs to a man whether that's biologically true or not. Now that's become rather unnecessary in recent years because workers gained rights and the old system of 'ignore the biology' fell out of use. Birth certificates made certain that people had natural roots and ownership has become more of an individual thing. Women aren't their husband's property, women can own objects (houses, land), children have multiple parents. Thus marriage doesn't serve the purpose it did (I hope I'm not repeating anyone else, I read this thread yesterday and I seem to have a very hazy memory of it).
 
 
Cat Chant
10:13 / 03.10.03
An "Open Marriage"... where two people in question have agreed they are together for life, but they have other sexual partners, different bank accounts, possibly different residences, maybe even different plans for the future..? I mean, where does the actual contract of marriage and the agreed conditions of it apply then? Is it redundant?

Yes, this is very intriguing, and I'd be fascinated to know what people who think they might get married someday (or are already married) think about it. Because for me, if I want to be in a long-term non-monogamous, non-cohabiting relationship, I don't want to express that through signing a legal contract which is deemed to be broken by adultery or non-cohabitation. That seems bizarrely inappropriate to me.

One thing I think is important here is that even where marriage is taken as the model, different relationships will be policed in different ways. For example, I nearly got married to a friend's brother for immigration purposes last year, and the Home Office would have checked up to see that we were in fact living together and, as far as possible, to see that we were having sex (certainly if we had been found to be having sex with other people, our marriage would have been deemed legally invalid, the man's immigration status would have been revoked, and I could have gone to prison). Similarly, to prove that a same-sex relationship is "akin to marriage", you have to prove monogamy, residence, & financial interdependence. A heterosexual marriage between two citizens is not going to be checked up on in the same way - certainly neither party is going to go to prison for "defrauding" the State (through adultery, not cohabiting, not having a joint account, etc), even though they are just as much in breach of contract as the citizen/non-citizen marriage. And that, I think, gives straight co-citizens a great deal more freedom in how to use the available 'package' that is marriage. Which is possibly part of what breeds resentment among people who don't have that freedom, and to whom the legal constraints are, well, more constrictive: to have people say "Well, the legal part of it doesn't matter, it's all about the party," when in other relationships the legal part of it is pretty significant, always begs the question why sign the fucking contract, then?

I'm having a hazy thought about how there's something I resent about how the privilege of heterosexual monogamy is such that some couples can feel that the legal privilege is irrelevant to the marriage, but I can't find a way to put it properly...

having everyone in the same place at the same time really appeals... a wedding is the event that you caused.

And some people don't want to do that? Each to their own I guess.

Well, I have to say that for me the link between "causing an event", "having everyone in the same place at the same time" and "making a legal commitment to heterosexual monogamy" isn't obvious. Like I say, if I want to cause an event to celebrate my place in a community, I'll be a keynote speaker at a conference. That way I'll appear in a context that matters to me. Can you explain a bit more about why, if it's all about the party, it has to be a wedding? What does 'wedding' do to the party that makes it more significant? Is it about reaffirming your place in a community of family and friends - and if so, what potential is there for finding other rituals or ceremonies that could do this without the enforcement of coupledom? (This starts opening up all sorts of questions about whether 'invented traditions' can ever be as meaningful or useful for people as, er, traditional traditions...)
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:02 / 03.10.03
Not forgetting of course that traditions have changing meanigns over time, and have indeed frequently been invented (c.f. E. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition) or imported (turkey at Christmas, clan tartans, etc.). And we've already seen in this thread that the institution and process of marriage has had many different meanings and aspects over time, some of which are now obsolete, some of which have retained force, some of which are perhaps becoming more important now than they ever were before. I think it is fairly obvious that marriage functions on several levels - religious, legal, personal, social, civil and that there is no reason why most of those functions can be performed just as adequately and with more flexibility by other types of relationship 'contract' (where I can't think of another word to express a binding agreement of whatever sort between members of a relationship), and a great big 'pffft' to the tyranny of tradition.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:05 / 03.10.03
I mean, of course, that there is no adequate reason why this should not be the case - not that it actually is the case at present...
 
 
Cat Chant
12:00 / 03.10.03
Kit-Cat Club, will you marry me?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:28 / 03.10.03


Well, I have to say that for me the link between "causing an event", "having everyone in the same place at the same time" and "making a legal commitment to heterosexual monogamy" isn't obvious.

That's because you're linking marriage and the event that is the wedding. While they're clearly connected and one becomes truly valid only with the implication that the other holds they're still separate. So the fact that I would enjoy the event of the wedding does not immediately imply that I wish to make that legal commitment.

Like I say, if I want to cause an event to celebrate my place in a community, I'll be a keynote speaker at a conference.

But culturally that's a very different kind of event. It holds formality but doesn't have the same atmosphere around it at all. The context is not the important thing, it's the actual feel of the thing.

Can you explain a bit more about why, if it's all about the party, it has to be a wedding? What does 'wedding' do to the party that makes it more significant? Is it about reaffirming your place in a community of family and friends- and if so, what potential is there for finding other rituals or ceremonies that could do this without the enforcement of coupledom?


God, there aren't any... except for funerals and who wants to be at their own (except Dirty Den)? I think the most community affirming rituals always grow out of a culture very slowly. The very solemnity of taking part in such a ritual makes the party. That's why any old party just won't do. People don't turn up for anything and they don't have the foolish mix of constraint and abandon that a reception always introduces.

Having said all this I still suspect I'll never bother. Sure I want a wedding but in order to have one I'd have to sacrifice the moral code I've been relying on since I was about 9 years old. It's all terribly, upsettingly archaic, damn society for shattering my dreams of parties and big dresses and pretty white shoes!
 
 
cusm
12:37 / 03.10.03
You know, I hadn't considered non-cohabitation to be an element of "open marriage". I suppose that is how some people do it. For us, we have an otherwise completely ordinary cohabitating marriage, with the additon of occasional lovers on the side. More a recognition and allowance for the normal human urge to stray than anything else. Its the usual thing with a bit of polyarmory for spice.

But this does raise the question of what marriage entails. For if you are not living together, have seperate bank accounts, and other lovers, how can you call yourself married? It seems that at least a majority of these things, if not all of them, must be present for the relationship to be sensibly viewed as a marriage. The idea in marriage is a joining of lives at every level, or at least most.

For lets face it, the roots are in binding the woman to the man as property, which has been extended and amended in the modern day to a more two sided relationship. I think in a way then what the legal ramifications of marriage are still trying to demonstrate is ownership of the other person. The only difference now is that legally the woman 'owns' the man just as much as he her. And from this ownership comes all the legal rights and responsibilities this partnership offers. Legally, love isn't even accounted for.

This is in notable contrast to the laws regarding marriage visas. I think that is because in this case the allowance for such a visa was made on the idea that the marriage was for love, and that love is a reasonable exception for the normal rules of citizenship. This is interesting, because it is a legal device created on the modern concept of marriage as a union of love rather than the historic one of a binding of property. Hence, the review board must check up on the couple to see if they really are in love, and this is proven by behaving as property. So we come full circle again.
 
 
Cat Chant
12:48 / 03.10.03
So the fact that I would enjoy the event of the wedding does not immediately imply that I wish to make that legal commitment

Hmm. So it would be like a wedding, but you wouldn't actually get married - you'd stand up in front of all your friends but not say "I do"?

This is really intriguing me now. How far could you push the separation between the wedding and the marriage? Would there have to be a bridegroom, for instance? At what point does it become not-a-wedding? (Because I have to say that getting married is fairly crucial to my own conception of what constitutes a wedding...)
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:29 / 03.10.03
Gosh and from theory we suddenly stray in to an area that's becoming scarily practical.

How far could you push the separation between the wedding and the marriage? Would there have to be a bridegroom, for instance? At what point does it become not-a-wedding?

I suspect that if you wanted to retain the 'event' than you couldn't push it very far at all. There would have to be the shade of a wedding, the same atmosphere. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to follow the ceremony exactly but simply marry in an illegal area- in other words get married illegally. They would certainly be separate without actually being separate.

A bridegroom, hell this has just become an illegal act, who says it has to be heterosexual?! Seriously though, why wouldn't a wedding work for a same-sex couple? The atmosphere at a wedding is always slightly strained but as long as the people there perceive the act as an everyday yet once in a lifetime event it works.

I'm not sure when it becomes not-a-wedding. I've always thought it ridiculous that Ken Livingstone's office have named the ceremonies that they're performing 'partnership registration'. My arse- sounds like a fucking wedding to me. I suppose that's really what I mean when I point out that a wedding and a marriage are separate entities... anyone can have a wedding if it's the right type of celebration but the right to marry is horribly restricted.
 
 
Persephone
14:10 / 03.10.03
What does 'wedding' do to the party that makes it more significant?

I was thinking along these lines at my niece's bat mitzvah, because I thought the whole ceremony of celebrating a young person's entrance into the community was just beautiful ...only too bad about all the guff about God, you know. So I was enthusing about why can't we have a ritual like this, only without the religion? And Radix helpfully pointed out that it's the religion that makes people believe in the ritual.

Weddings are like that. A party is a party, but you add the wedding part & because of how that ritual, and the institution of marriage, is ingrained in the culture ...suddenly you have gravitas. Or not to put too fine a point on it, you have power. And you could, indeed, work up this sort of power yourself on a personal basis... but when you go in for a wedding, it's just handed to you. Weight of centuries, and so forth. I felt this. It was like being handed a sceptre. Most of my inlaws live in California, and I summoned them to the Midwest to spend the weekend with me. Cousins came from England --but see, they wouldn't have come just for a party. They were compelled by the wedding.

I mean, that's one way to look at it.
 
 
Papess
17:34 / 03.10.03
"Weddings are like that. A party is a party, but you add the wedding part & because of how that ritual, and the institution of marriage, is ingrained in the culture ..."

A lot of these "rituals" that are ingrained in our culture do have a bit of a magickal nature in their roots (hieros gamos, anyone?), even if it is not so recognised today as such. I think we celebrate such rites in this ritualised manner to subconciously embue it with a power....like a group working.
 
 
Papess
21:29 / 03.10.03
Wait a minute....

The heiros gamos is a fertility rite, but in recent history and even presently we regard marrige as a property settlement of some sort.

Did I miss something?
 
 
Cat Chant
08:26 / 04.10.03
A bridegroom, hell this has just become an illegal act, who says it has to be heterosexual?!

Oops! I think I kind of meant - does there have to be a second person involved at all? Most of the ways you've been describing the 'illegal-wedding' so far have been to do with the party, the community, etc, rather than celebrating the union of two people (of whatever sex). That might be because of the types of questions I've been asking, or it might be because it seems so obvious that a wedding has to be about a celebration of coupledom that you didn't make it explicit... but how does the 'lifelong commitment to being a couple' fit in? Is it just because that's what the social ritual of the wedding is about, so it's the only available way to get what you want from the wedding, or is it important to you to be making a commitment to someone else at the same time as having the big party/community involvement?

And Persephone - that's so interesting! Do you think your response was particularly conditioned by being the bride - ie do you know whether the groom felt like he had a sceptre, too?

May Tricks - I think you may have missed where children were (a) considered property and (b) necessary to ensure continuity of property line through the generations. (There's probably more to it than that but I'm not familiar with the ritual of which you speak in more than the most general terms, so I don't know.)
 
 
Persephone
20:28 / 04.10.03
ie do you know whether the groom felt like he had a sceptre, too?

I will ask! He's around here somewhere...
 
 
Persephone
20:38 / 04.10.03
Oh damn, I forgot to mention that I have seen the end of the world... I don't know if everyone's seen those stretch SUVs around? They're like stretch limos, except that they're SUVs?

Today I saw a stretch Hummer. It was parked outside a church for a wedding! It was decorated with white carnations!!

All I could think was how that had to be the ultimate, naked expression of power at a wedding...
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
22:07 / 04.10.03
Deva - In a prior discussion some time ago on the subject of marriage you, in basic terms, stated that by getting married or supporting marriage, in the recognised by the state sense of the term, people were selling out those in same sex partnerships. Would you say that you still hold with this opinion?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:39 / 05.10.03
Seldom - I think I've already said something like that on this thread, though hopefully in less inflammatory terms. I said to Lurid, roughly, that every act of getting married reinforces the centrality, the power and the range of the institution of marriage, which is a model I would rather see wither and die from lack of energy/support as more models/ institutions/ ceremonies/ traditions become available. What I would retract is the idea that the basic division is between het and same-sex partnerships, since obviously there are m/f partnerships that reject the marriage model and m/m or f/f partnerships that eagerly accept it.

And Persephone - I didn't know what a Hummer was so I did a Google image search ( this picture and this one are perhaps the most relevant), and you have indeed seen the end of the world. That is absolutely brilliant.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
13:26 / 05.10.03
"So it would be like a wedding, but you wouldn't actually get married."

I could talk about what I reckon about marraige, but I'd be repeating Deva and Persephone's words, so won't bother. Instead, a personal anecdote.

Once upon a time when I was a girl, I had a wedding with my then girlfriend. It began as this private joke, and then suddenly we had applied for funding to an arts festival and were making art in the middle of the city, with 300 guests and various media, tourists and passersby watching. It was a lot of fun and very weird. We made zines about the politics of marriage and same-sex relationships, how we weren't attached to monogamy. The celebrant was an MC friend, who rapped the vows to a DJ. My girlfriend's sister was the Wedding Dress, because we were both too butch to wear it: she rollerskated around in a kind of spectre-like fashion handing out fliers. We also had a honeymoon, courtesy of the (other) bride's bemused but progressive father. I remember telling my family about it as if it was a joke, or meaningless, so they didn't show, but I think in retrospect that I should have made them come...

People kept asking us if we would move in together afterwards, and what it meant, and this was annoying: it had to *mean* something, it had to signify that we would be together forever. It didn't, and we were quite clear about this. We didn't move in together: in fact we broke up nine months later, but who cares? For us it meant we were a) in love and b) exhibitionists. Some random radical feminist types harrassed us about how having the wedding was 'condoning' marriage: we didn't want to condone marriage, but we also wanted to stress, to whoever would listen, that for people like us, doing this legally (and gaining the privileges that the state doles out to married folk) was impossible.

The whole thing was very stressful, and I probably wouldn't do it again. On the other hand it was amazing fun, and very emotional. A lot of people cried, in a good way. I would totally recommend this for anyone who wants the wedding without the marriage. Do it in as public a place as you can find. Invite everyone you know, whether or not you think they'll approve. Be as complex and contradictory as you want. Don't listen to anyone who tells you you should do things a certain way. It doesn't have to be forever. It doesn't have to be legal. So you see, you can push the 'event' rather far. As far as you want.

(I can't get away from marriage, it seems: now I'm writing a thesis about a transsexual getting married to his female partner, and the state taking them to court. Which is a whole 'nother story, obviously, and probably more interesting.)
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:20 / 05.10.03
Personally, I still don't understand the hostility to marriage. Lets put it like this. Suppose a couple want to declare a pair bond for two purposes. First, they want a big community celebration of their love and union. Second, they want a way for the other person to be recognised broadly as some kind of next of kin. Note, this is much more complex than writing wills. It affects rights, provileges and responsibilities, to do with health, children and the law.

Now saying that a person might as well be a key note speaker at a conference as get married rather misses the point of all that, since the functions are entirely different.

OK. You might want to say that this kind of pair bond I have described is not the only valid one. I agree. And you might argue that there should be alternatives to marriage. I agree again. But so what? Does that make the choice I have described above invalid?
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
14:39 / 05.10.03
Thanks Deva, I needed a little clarification on that, I thought this was the case but as you were presenting it in a more diplomatic manner I thought that I should check before going any further.

Given that the institutiton of marriage has made a reintroduction into your life on closer level than and political/legal, how do you feel about the effects that this has had on your family dynamic (biologically speaking)?

You say "a model I would rather see wither and die from lack of energy/support as more models/ institutions/ ceremonies/ traditions become available".
In terms of the ceremonies and traditions, there is a whole ingrained culture in almost any given society based around these which isn't strictly linked to the models and institutions that they now currently lead to. By this I mean that there is no binding one ceremony/tradition, one model status and the model is only bound by national location. Given this under the proviso that you don't disagree with me on that point then would you say that there is any validity in the argument for preservation of culture that doesn't tie to a model or institution which currently fails to provide for a identifiable segment of society?

Finally, on the political and legal level, as you refer to models in the plural, do you think that there could be a system whereby a government could provide, maintain and properly administrate multiple models and indeed should they?

The second two parts are open to anyone really as a breadth of opinion would be welcome.
 
 
Cat Chant
20:33 / 05.10.03
Lurid, I think it's more like... imagine there's only one style of trousers available in the world, and it doesn't actually fit anybody. Instead of people making their own trousers, everyone who can even roughly fit into the trousers buys them, so they carry on being made. I would call those trousers... the wrong trousers.

Sorry, my analogy ran away with me there. Hmm. What I mean is that marriage arbitrarily unites a number of functions which have no inherent connection to one another, and that getting married reinforces the idea that those functions have to come as a package (which reminds me - Mister Disco, I love the dress being separated out from both the partners!). To take your example, the two people who want to celebrate their union in their community and be recognized as each other's next-of-kin currently have no option but to do so through a legal commitment to monogamy, which may be no part of their plan for their lives, and permanence, which may be a part of their plan but is statistically unlikely. By agreeing to the 'package' that doesn't actually fit them, they agree to keep silent about an aspect of the very relationship they are supposed to be celebrating, and to condone the invisibility of that aspect in the ceremony they've chosen.

As for people who are actually going to conform, legally and ideologically, to the marriage model they're using in the ceremony... well, I brought up the whole thing about my sister in order to try to explain that one person's expression of hir identity affects another's. Marriage exists as part of a spectrum, and what it means, culturally, is defined by being distinguished from all sorts of relationships that are not marriage. So I don't think it's possible to say that this huge, central model can exist without having any effect on the way people are able to express alternatives.
 
 
Persephone
01:51 / 06.10.03
Radix speaks!

P: ...so the question is, was it like being handed a sceptre when we had our wedding?
R: WAH! I never got to hold the sceptre!!
P: Be serious!
R: Somebody was always hogging the sceptre!!
P: Goddamnit, we both had sceptres...
R: I only had a tiny sceptre. Yours was bigger.
P: I'm posting all of this on Barbelith, you know. People will get the wrong impression.
R: (...)
P: Now then.
R: I'm not the right person to ask this question.
P: Why not?
R: I will answer you elliptically. At the I---- conference, for Casino Night they had this grand prize game. They took your picture, and then you would win tickets at the various casino games. Then you would turn in your tickets, and that's how you got into the grand prize game. It was a drawing. So the more tickets you won and turned in, the more chances you had to win. So they had three television monitors, and the screens spun like on a slot machine. If you won, it would stop on your picture. And the whole time I was thinking No! No! Don't stop on my picture! And I didn't turn in any more tickets after that.
P: Okay...
R: I don't like to be the center of attention. I'm not the kind of person who would actively look to wield power at a wedding.
P: This isn't a hypothetical situation! There was a wedding. You were there. Did you or did you not feel like you were holding a sceptre?! What about sitting by ourselves at that little table like a king and a queen?
R: There was some exercise of power.
P: Thank you. Now do you think that the woman exercises more power than the man? At a wedding.
R: Traditionally, yes.
P: But not at our wedding.
R: No.
P: Because we have a peer relationship.
R: Well, we dispensed with certain things. Like the bridal shower.
P: And the engagement ring.
R: And the proposal. The proposal is when power is transferred to the woman.
P: (!!!)
R: Men proposing to women is all about power. The power is in not proposing, that is. By proposing, the man transfers the power to the woman. So you could say that the proposal is the moment when the man hands the sceptre to the woman...
 
 
YNH
07:29 / 06.10.03
I'm having a hazy thought about how there's something I resent about how the privilege of heterosexual monogamy is such that some couples can feel that the legal privilege is irrelevant to the marriage, but I can't find a way to put it properly...

I don't want to appear glib, Deva, but I think you did. At present, apparent heterosexual monogamists (or citizen polyamorists, I suppose) have the option to accept or reject the present marriage contract, or one set of trousers, as it exists. No one else does. However, once accepted (ie once papers are signed), the ramifications can be ignored indefinitely. The legal privilege fades into the background as the negotiation of the chosen mode of relation becomes the actual work of daily interaction.

In this and maybe only this way heterosexual monogamy reaffirmed by a marriage contract may differ very little from any among a wide spectrum of relationships.

Many, if not all, of the remaining positions require significant consideration of legal rights at various times. What's not to resent if there's something you have to consider, even agonize over, that these folks don't?

Can we break down into parts the package of marriage as it is encountered? Next-of-kin status, parenting rights, insured/beneficiary statuses, access to financial aid (private, not government), social affirmation, social acceptance... any or none of those?
 
 
Lurid Archive
08:44 / 06.10.03
I'm starting to get the feeling that perhaps I don't really disagree with anyone here, I just differ in my tone. I'm not sure I agree with the analyses as put and the explanations just don't convince me.

For instance, I wouldn't call Deva's trousers the wrong trousers. That would sounds awfully like telling someone who actually wanted those trousers that they were making the wrong choice. The fact that they may be privileged, while I may not be does not mean that I try to undermine their rights in order to boost my own. That sounds wrong headed to me.

But, as I say, perhaps it makes no difference. For when I think of the practical consequences of what anyone is saying (and being a simple minded soul, that is the way I tend to think), I can't imagine that there to be much disagreement. Extending marriage rights and introducing flexibility into the contract both sound fine to me. On the way one probably wants to raise awareness of different lifestyles and the choices denied them. All sounds good. Is that all anyone is really talking about?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
08:58 / 06.10.03
[kind of threadrot]

Mr Disco, I want your wedding. (My dad would be so proud of me.)

[/kind of threadrot]
 
 
Persephone
13:33 / 06.10.03
Re: Disco's wedding, that's kind of what I was saying in the Late Shift about using gay weddings as a model? For the girl who wants a wedding without the bother of a marriage? This thought is only half-formed, but it goes sort of like ...say that gay weddings are modelled from straight ones. But I think that there's more ...involvement, I guess, in creating a gay wedding, because it's not a shake-and-bake recipe. You have to add your own importance to the event, and so forth. But if you're basically straight, then you tend to think that you can only pick from the menu ...or not eat. Am I making any sense? For a basically straight, monogamous person, there's this automatic acceptance of the wedding + marriage package. Just because marriage is available to you. I mean, I really wish that I had had the presence of mind to be able to separate those two things...
 
 
cusm
13:46 / 06.10.03
On the wedding itself, when you take away all the glitz and glamor, what you are really doing is saying vows in front of witnessess. The purpose of the wedding at its core is to make these promises to your partner, and to enforce these promsies through the presence of witnesses. A more religious wedding includes God as one of these witnesses.

So if you don't like marriage but like the ceremony of the wedding, who is to say you have to take marriage vows at your wedding? I mean really, you could be promising nothing more than to remember each other's birthdays and visit every tuesday to watch Buffy. Which, being that Buffy is over, would rather nullify your wedding vows, wouldn't it?

But anyway, point being, if you want to use a different model of relationship that marriage but want to keep the wedding part, just change the vows. And if you put it in writing and sign it, its a legal contract, too.
 
 
Papess
20:28 / 06.10.03
Perhaps, this may be of interest...


A Polemic Against Love


Kipnis' answer is that marriage is an insidious social construct, harnessed by capitalism to get us to have kids and work harder to support them. Her quasi-Marxist argument sees desire as inevitably subordinated to economics. And the price of this subordination is immense: Domestic cohabitation is a "gulag"; marriage is the rough equivalent of a credit card with zero percent APR that, upon first misstep, zooms to a punishing 30 percent and compounds daily. You feel you owe something, or you're afraid of being alone, and so you "work" at your relationship, like a prisoner in Siberia ice-picking away at the erotic permafrost.

...

The connection between sex and love, she argues, doesn't last as long as the need for each. And we probably shouldn't invest so much of our own happiness in the idea that someone else can help us sustain it—or spend so much time trying to make unhappy relationships "work." We should just look out for ourselves, perhaps mutually—more like two people gazing in the same general direction than two people expecting they want to look in each other's eyes for the rest of their (now much longer) lives. For this model to work, she argues, our social decisions need to start reflecting the reality of declining marriage rates—not the fairy-tale "happily ever after all" version.


I am not saying I agree or disgree with Ms.Kipnis, but it seems interesting. I find her usage of terms a little loose, but she has an intriguing perspective.

I think there is some audio on this link, from a radioshow. Yes there is, I am listening now.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:30 / 06.10.03
I think Kamandi has raised lots of very interesting points, but since I am all sleepy can I just wuffle like a curious shrew at :

Thank you. Now do you think that the woman exercises more power than the man? At a wedding.

I've never been married, but I'm curious about this: how do we work it out? My instinct is that women have constricting clothing, lack freedom of movement, are given away, swear to obey... in a traditional ceremony, the power, if power there be, doesn't seem to be with the woman. Are we assuming that these are trappings and either removed or made meaningless by modernity, and thus the power lies in actually wrestling that shiftless bloke in the tuxedo up the aisle in the first place, or is there a deeper power that underpins the entire process?
 
 
grant
21:18 / 06.10.03
I'm with Radix on that one -- it's no accident the groom gets down on one knee. Traditionally.

The bride totally calls the shots in a traditional wedding. Chooses not only her own (constrictive) dress, but also the (constrictive, frequently ugly) dresses of her best friends. Themes, food, etc. The bride's father might foot the bill, but she's the queen for the day.

That's what it's mutated into now; originally, the Best Man was an office held by a trusted companion to defend the groom against warriors from the bride's family while the ceremony was going on. The menfolk come to steal their woman back. Or so I've read.

By the way, it might be worth looking over the difference between the traditional ceremony (oaths to obey, giving away the bride, "the groom is like Christ and the bride is like His church") and the other traditional stuff that goes on at weddings (throwing of bouquets, cutting of cake). The rite vs. the feast.
Dunno.
 
 
Persephone
22:09 / 06.10.03
Haus: I think the sense is that the wedding is a sort of stage where the woman gets to play at power. It is all by the permission of the man, which is why I have a deep abiding hatred of proposals.

it's no accident the groom gets down on one knee

*violent reaction*

Oh god, my first fiance proposed to me on his knee... just the thought enrages me! I wish I had kicked him in the chest. I used to wear high-heeled shoes back then, too...
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:32 / 06.10.03
Persephone, if any man did that to me I *would* kick him in the chest. Gosh it almost makes you hope someone will... seriously though eewww, there are women out there who want men to kneel down and present a sign of ownership to them? Hello, are you living on Planet Prod me with a Tazer?

Haus think about it this way- you're in a biiiggg Church at High Mass. How do you tell who's got the power? The holy man in the most ludicrous, bright outfit. Same old, same old. You're in a church, there's a wedding going on, who's got the power? Woman in a ludicrous, white outfit! At least religion's consistent *snigger*
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:33 / 06.10.03
(See no one listens to me when I say that power structure is entirely readable through dress and more the fool all of you.)
 
 
Lurid Archive
00:16 / 07.10.03
seriously though eewww, there are women out there who want men to kneel down and present a sign of ownership to them?

Yes, seriously. At the last wedding I attended, the bride described it to me and how it made her felt. Good, btw. And also, I was asked to agree with the proposition that "a woman can't feel secure in a relationship until the committment of marriage is given".

You can dismiss this as...well, many things, but there are people out there who think like that. Lots of them, I think, for whom marriage as it stands is just the ticket.

They are wierd and freaky, but I would urge tolerance.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
09:08 / 07.10.03
It was a rhetorical question, I lived in a house with four other girls and three out of the five of us wanted a traditional proposal and the others would all change their surname to their partners. Needless to say I spent two years trying to convince them this was a very bad idea. It didn't work.
 
  

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