Maybe we’ll get there. After all, the only constant in the history of marriage is change; change to include new conceptions of who is recognized as “marriage material.” It started with marriage being allowed across classes, then across ethnicities, then across borders, then it didn’t change for ages until marriage equality was passed. And while I personally might not have cared, for many, exclusion from the institution of marriage has had a very real impact. It wasn’t until 2009, for example, that Obama lifted a 1987 ban on HIV-positive immigrants entering the USA. Of course, there was a waiver: if you were married. But since gay people couldn’t marry, there was no waiver for them. In an article in Out magazine from the year 2000, it was estimated that 30,000 couples, according to the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force, were split up because the U.S. immigration system failed to see that gay and lesbian partnerships were valid enough to make a case for a visa. But then one day the White House was lit up in rainbow colors, and all of a sudden, we could cross those borders together.
This is because marriage benefits the state, because the state benefits from marriage. Think about it: coupled off, raising the next generation of your country’s workforce (namely, children) together, caring for each other until one of you dies, and then the children you raised care for the last one standing? And so pressure is put on us to marry, from society, family, and religion, because marriage is the central—and only—man-made ritual that commits two people to caring for each other until death.
And yet, all of this said, I am getting married in a week. To the partner who once didn’t believe in marriage. And he is marrying me—a non-binary person who will be misgendered on a national marriage register until it is destroyed many, many years after I die, or we divorce. So why on earth am I getting married?
There are so many reasons—I would argue the most oblique are outlined above—to say “I don’t.” It’s costly, half of them end in divorce, and it’s pretty humiliating to become some sort of attention-seeking bridezilla when all you’ve done, really, is planned a party—not to mention it’s seemingly a commitment to a life of monogamy, normativity, to “honor” and “obey”?
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