I got married this year. It was totally out of the blue, and we were probably way too young: At 30, with big teary eyes, we walked down the aisle to the sound of Kelis’s “Acappella,” and all our queer friends, our family, showered us with love and romance. It was, and I hate—truly, despise—being a cliche, the best day of my life. Trash, I know.
And I could see this trash reflected in the eyes of the many people I met in the following months; people who proceeded to look me up and down and, with the face of someone who had just taken a bite from a lemon, say “congratulations.” “On what?” I would say.
A year prior, my friend Talia had been the youngest in our group of progressive millennial (vile) left-wingers to tie the knot. And I remember her saying that now, getting married, at least among well read women and gays, was seen as old-hat, un-progressive. We had spent our twenties decrying the patriarchy, dressing in drag, and dancing all night at queer raves, and now we were walking down the aisle, cutting the cake, crying as our friends threw confetti. Before I decided to tie the knot, I wondered if Talia had abandoned her politics, our promises, and had joined the dark side: trading in social resistance for a choose-your-own-adventure feminism.
Though the fault lines have shifted, the submerged belligerence between single people and those who have permanently coupled up is nothing new. In Sex And The City Season 1, Episode 3, Carrie goes to hang out with Patience and Peter, her married friends, in the Hamptons. After a night of trading her single sex stories for a stay away from Manhattan, the next morning she accidentally walks in on Peter and catches a glimpse of his dick, before she is swiftly pushed out of the guesthouse. “Married women are threatened because we can have sex anytime anywhere with anyone” says Samantha (adore). And together the women set up the case for the Cold War between marrieds and singles, one where singles become “losers, lepers, and whores,” one where the ultimate shame is to be in your thirties, single, without even the prospect of marriage. And one where, crucially, married people are judgmental, patronizing, smug.
As I say every week here at Vogue: things of course have changed since the show was aired. Since, and likely partially because of, Sex and the City, the idea that marriage is the only option for women has been hugely challenged. Now people had the same questions for me that I had for Talia: Have you abandoned your politics? Isn’t it a little… humiliating to get married when we know all we know? In fact, and perhaps rightly so, there’s a judgment reserved for the marrieds that perhaps used to only be leveled at the singles.
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