sunnyexpectations-deactivated20 asked: Do you think you will eventually marry Patrick?
Patrick and I have similar feelings about marriage. I doubt he will ever get married, and I can say for certain that I will never marry “for love”. No one needs marriage to validate their relationship in that sense. But would I marry for citizenship, health insurance, etc.? Sure, if only because I want to enjoy those benefits. (Not that I’d even have to specifically marry Patrick for those things.)
Basically, if you’re going to get married, I don’t think you should fool yourself into thinking that it’s going to make your relationship so much more meaningful. The marriage is not the end-all, be-all. No, your relationship ought to be awesome whether or not it gets rubber-stamped by some government official, and you ought to be confident enough in it that you don’t need marriage in order to make it work. If you have to “make it official” in order to sustain a life commitment, then you should probably think twice about getting married anyway.
Beyond legal rights and benefits, the only logical reason why one would ever need state recognition* of their relationship is if they wanted to make it harder for their partner to leave them. This sounds kind of depressing, but it’s actually a conservative line of thought, and one that I agree with. According to “pro-family” advocates who want to preserve marital sanctity, the institution of marriage is crumbling and that this is cause for alarm because families are being broken, children being abandoned, gay people being uppity, the list goes on. But if there’s really havoc, why is it the logical solution to exclude gay people who want to marry and to tell unhappily married folks to stay in incompatible relationships? The answer is not to forbid same-sex unions, decry divorce, and discourage all that premarital hanky-panky that ruins you for life. (Yeah, divorce might suck, but the fact that people can leave their partners today is a huge — and relatively recent — win for personal freedom.) Instead, the glorification of marriage only encourages people to think that tying the knot solves your problems, imbues your union with meaning, guarantees fidelity, offers personal fulfillment, and permanently chains your desired partner to your left leg for the duration of your existence. Reality check: it doesn’t.
No matter how much I may want to spend the entirety of my life (or for the moment, my young adulthood) with Patrick, I realize that getting hitched is not going to prevent him from leaving me if our relationship goes to shit. And you know what? If that were to happen, I’d want to break up — not because our relationship isn’t important to me, but because there are all kinds of relationships that end for all kinds of reasons. Whether or not the people involved are married says nothing about whether they should stay together and nothing about how they feel about each other.
As long as I’m in this relationship, I can be certain that we’re both here because we want to be, that I don’t need marriage to tell me how I feel about my partner, and that if I get married, it’s not to validate his love. I don’t need marriage to give me what I already have.
More burning questions? Ask them here.
* Yes, I realize that folks get married for a litany of reasons, but I’m talking about why one would NEED to get married in an attempt to demonstrate that marriage in the Western world is usually a “want” rather than a “need” and that our dedication to obtaining it reflects how we’ve been socialized to equate marriage with love and to equate lack of marriage with lack of commitment.
