Today is my first wedding anniversary, and in the grand romantic tradition of our relationship, I am elsewhere, doing other stuff with other people, but I thought I’d write my thoughts on marriage anyway
really honestly i think marriage is a crock and it does uphold power structures and capitalism, but I think the most damaging thing about marriage is that its a lie.
Marriage isn’t about love, nobody gets married because they love each other even though that is always the presumed reason. They get married for legal social or financial reason. I totally didn’t get married for love, my partner and I do love each other deeply but we know that, and everybody important to us knows that, we mainly got married for legal reasons, the main one being that with my history of mental health, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that I end up being sectioned. and without being married it would be really easy for my parents to swan in and make all the decisions on what happens to me, but being married bumps my partner up to next of kin status and stops that happening, with no way of anybody disputing that.
People still presume that if you are married to someone the relationship is more serious than if you are not which is something that is incredibly disrespectful and irritates the hell out of me, i was at a birthday dinner for my partners father and somebody mentioned how i was family now since I got married, my partners brothers partner was also their, they have been together for at least fifteen years but are not married and I really wondered how that made her feel pretty much being told she wasn’t family. (especially since she spent a lot of those years helping bringing her partners son up, so what is she? the hired help? the nanny?) (this is wandering of into a rant about how the nuclear family suck) just because you don’t have a legal document it doesnt make you any less important to the people you love and who love you.
we should all be able to make living condition contracts/civil partnership contracts with whoever we want to. we should respect that people choose to build and maintain and signify there relationships in different ways. we should be able to choose who makes the decisions for us regardless of who we are related to by blood or law. but untill we can do all those things people are going to continue marrying
I pretty much never thought I’d get married and that if I did it would be only when lgbt people could get married, but with the increasing understanding of just how abusive my parents were and the increasing estrangement that arose out of that, needing a way to legally signify a different next of kin and to socially signify my disconnection for them became pressing. though I wouldn’t have done it if the civil partnership laws havent been passed
recently I had a discussion with someone about how a section of society didn’t have a right to something that the rest of society have a right to as a default because the need for what they were arguing for arose out of patriarchal society.
If you grow up in a society that tells you something is really really important then it becomes really really important and so arguing that LGBT people shouldnt be fighting for the right to marriage is a crock, I think it would be better either if marriage didn’t exist or any number and combination of people could make contracts with each other, but as is with something that is so socially and legally important why shouldn’t anybody be able to do it?
I would have had a civil partnership ceremony if it was available to heterosexual couples but It isn’t (so clearly anyone arguing that marriage and civil partnership are the same is a crock)
The interesting thing is, having said all that, having thought all these things about marriage, getting married still made me feel more secure in my relationship
I don’t generally tell people I got married, I didn’t change my name, I don’t wear a ring and I still refer to him as my partner, (which interestingly means lots of people think I’m in a lesbian relationship)
and peoples attitudes to me and my relationship have changed, there seems to be more of an assumption that he has control over me and a right of veto over what I do and where I go (and even how short my hair is, which I personally find amusing seeing as its my partner that cuts my hair) but that’s not about my relationship, that’s about peoples attitudes to it.
however the anti marriage for any reason at all ethos in feminism is beginning to piss me off
and as a result of getting married I’m finding shit like this
Also, generally, a wife has to allow herself to “be fucked” by her husband as a ‘duty’. really stresses me out
I do not have to “allow” myself to be fucked by my partner, I don’t see sex as a duty on my part and neither does he I wouldn’t be in a relationship if that were the case. none of my married friends have to allow themselves to be fucked by their partner’s, what year is this again?
At baseline I got married to protect my self from further patriarchal woundings,from further damage that my parents could do to me. Using another part of the patriarchal structure to do it was not ideal i know, but if we lived in an ideal socioety it wouldnt have been an issue in the first place and i realy dont need people telling me that my partner is further abusing me