Are my “fucked up views” directly related to my relationship with my parents?
In response to my post on the reader-submitted question “Do you think you will eventually marry Patrick?”, Brooke wrote:
Please state the martial status of your parents and your relatives. Your fucked up views concerning this issue is directly related to your terrible experiences growing up. [Link]
Brooke is a troll. A persistent one at that, since ze has been chiming in with comments for months, usually suggesting that holding radical views about sex and gender indicates that one comes from a messed up family background. Because I thought it might actually be of general relevance, I wrote the following response:
My parents were married until I was 14. Their relationship began in China amidst incredibly difficult economic circumstances that we would be hard-pressed to even comprehend. Did they marry out of love? To some degree, yes. But after they immigrated to America, it became clear — to just about everyone — that they were incompatible as life partners. My mother was told by her family that she should not divorce my father under any circumstances. No one seemed to care that my parents didn’t love each other; family honor, whatever that means, was more important. While I was fairly certain that their marriage would dissolve once both children left for college, I’m glad my mother made that decision earlier (in 2001) rather than later. (Since my sister is just graduating high school next month, the divorce would have had to wait for nearly another decade.)
Both my parents are happier now without having to live together, their respective families have more or less come to terms with their separation, and they are perhaps the most cordial divorced couple I’ve heard of. When I graduate next month, for example, my mother is staying at my apartment with my father’s sister; my father is staying at a hotel with my mother’s brother. During their visit, I will worry about many things, such as how to hide my sex toys. What I won’t worry about is whether my parents will get pissed at each other and embarrass me in some grand fashion. They won’t; now that they don’t have to live together, my parents actually like each other. It’s as functional as dysfunction gets.
Did my family background influence my “fucked up views” about marriage? Perhaps, but let’s remember that I was raised by conservative Asian immigrants, not hippies. It’s not like my mother was all gung-ho about the idea of me taking off to Europe post-graduation with boyfriend and puppy dog but sans engagement ring. I am sure I speak for the daughters of many overzealous Chinese mothers when I say that she would have liked nothing more than a wedding banquet with a dragon dance or two. My mother, despite being divorced, is rather into life partnerships and all that jazz and has many romantic ambitions for me, so she’s really happy that I’ve found someone with whom I can co-exist for lengthy periods of time. She has also come to accept, despite her deeply conservative upbringing, that it’s okay if I don’t want to get married and that marriage — as she learned firsthand herself — is not all that it’s cracked up to be. So why should she or anyone else be shoving it down my throat?
And why, in any case, should my parents’ failed relationship mean more than my happy, egalitarian one simply because they were married and we’re not? Most marriages don’t work out, so there is obviously nothing “special” that marriage offers a relationship and even legal battles are not sufficient disincentives for getting out when you really want to. On the other hand, there are also some unofficial relationships that never get rubber-stamped and yet last a lifetime. To say that getting married is the only true validation for a relationship is to slap in the face anyone who can’t or won’t marry for love.
