I’ve followed this and the other thread in the Head Shop with interest, but I’ve held back from joining in for a number of reasons. One is that marriage is quite a personal thing, anyway, and we all might have different reasons for doing it. The other is that when you shine the harsh light of analysis on marriage, and strip it down to its bare essentials, then it does - like a lot of things we routinely do in life - look a bit odd.
For my part, my marriage (in its actual sense) was born from a drunken night and a loved-up embrace and the sentiment that hey, we’re in our thirties and we love each other like we’ve never loved anyone else and how about us making the biggest commitment we can think of right now and doing this for the rest of our lives?
Of course, there are other commitments we could have made, such as skydiving together or joining a cult or going off to do missionary work in the Amazon, but right there and then marriage felt like the best thing in the world that we as two people could do to cement our relationship.
It seems to me that there are two basic debating points regarding marriage here. The first seems to be: "I just can’t for the life of me understand why anybody would want to go through this legal ceremony to saddle yourself with someone for, ostensibly, the rest of your life."
The other appears to be along the lines of: "Why do you take part in such a hetero-oppressive programme that gives you rights and benefits which are denied to other people who are not allowed by law to marry?"
Dealing with the first one: as I said, marriage is a very personal thing. If you’d have asked me ten years ago what my views on marriage were, I’d have probably told you that it was a cynical, pointless exercise and what’s the point anyway when divorce is so easy and doesn’t carry the stigma that it used to? But then something changed. I met the person with who, for the first time ever in my life, I could envisage spending a lifetime with. No, we didn’t need to get married to be happy, but we wanted to. And that made us just a little bit more happy. And yeah, you can have a party anytime, but at the risk of descending into cliché-dom, I’ll never, ever forget the day of my wedding and the sheer (Darius) amount of love in the room (/Darius).
And what do we get out of it? Stability. Partnership. Comfort. Understanding. Reliability. Commitment. Sharing. A sense of you and me against the world.
And, in a rather bizarre manner which I can’t properly explain, freedom. Marriage tends to focus and coalesce some of your feelings - or at least, this happened to me - and because we have an unspoken given that we are together, hopefully forever, then this takes away some of the pressure to be a couple. Since we married, if I’m out with friends or see family, I don’t get asked "Where’s Mrs Sax, then?" half as often as I did when we were unmarried. It’s as though by joining together to form a unit, our individuality paradoxically is magnified. People take it for granted that you’re a couple and don’t need to be in each other’s pockets all the time. Strange, but true.
The second argument I find harder to tackle, because deep down I know the points being made are quite correct. It isn’t fair. To drag Ganesh and Xoc into this once again, as other people in this thread seem to have decided they are fair game to use as case studies, no, it isn’t right that Mrs Sax and I get more legal rights than them. It isn’t right that if I die it goes without saying that my meagre assets go to Mrs Sax.
And I should point out that rights for married heterosexual couples aren’t quite as stupendous as people might think. There were no tax breaks for us upon getting married. When we had Zoot, we were eligible for Working Families Tax Credit, which amounted to about a tenner a week, paid into Mrs Sax’s bank account. Rather co-incidentally, I was put on a new tax code at the same time which - surprise, surprise - resulted in me paying about a tenner a week extra.
I also find that being married confers little or no noticeable respectability from "society". Sure, it pleased my mum, but that’s about it. People from all cultures and walks of life very often don’t bother to ask if I’m married and often assume I’m not. (Even though I wear a ring; Mrs Sax doesn’t). In fact, the only place I’ve ever felt it was an "issue" is here on Barbelith.
But still, yeah, I took advantage of an option that isn’t open to others, and as a result made myself part of the problem. As Haus said in the Head Shop (and this is perhaps the one thing that has caused me personally most upset in all my time here on Barbelith) recently - and I’m paraphrasing here, Haus, so apologies if I haven’t got this spot on - Getting married is like climbing on to a bus in 1960s America and sitting in the seats marked "whites only" just because you can. And if other people can’t sit there, well, maybe they will be able to one day so you’re not doing any harm by just sitting down, are you?
Maybe some people really see it like that. I’m saddened if they do, because there are a lot worse things in this world than getting married (and yes, I know we’re talking about marriage rather than "the worst things in this world", but still).
I’m sure more people lead much more politically pious lives than I do. I buy shit from Gap occasionally. I’ll walk past a beggar without meeting his gaze sometimes. I don’t always pick up the phone and pledge money to Comic Relief, simply because I can’t be arsed to. There are probably people who have contributed to this thread who live on Tesco No-Frills beans and send their food budget to the Sudan. I can’t match that. I start threads about yellow fucking trainers instead of entering into enough debate in the Head Shop. I wish I was more perfect. I’m not.
But I try to do other stuff, in the few ways I can. Yeah, sometimes I won’t walk straight past the beggar. Sometimes I’ll do stuff that might look like conscience-salving, but might help. I’ll help an old dear across the road. Mainly, I try to use my position as a journalist and column-writer to highlight injustice, rage against the machine, make people laugh. It might not yet have balanced out the fact that I’ve joined the climbed into the life-boat marked "married people only" while those unable to follow-suit stand and watch from the slowly sinking HMS Equal Opportunities, but hopefully one day it might go some way towards it.
Sorry if this has rambled on a bit. |
) this is a lot more accurate a description of where I am than pretty much every conversation I'd had outside a very specific/special environment. (BiCon)