I’ve been in the mood to blog lately, which is intimately interlinked with being in the mood to write. I’ve been doing the five-minute daily warm-ups from Bret Anthony Johnston’s Naming the World and other Exercises for the Creative Writer, and they have helped immensely with working me back into the rhythm of daily writing.
Yesterday I finally went to Kathryn Albertson Park for an exercise in observation, and I was struck with the desire to write an entry, or an essay, about my obsession with marriage. Typing this clause gives me pause largely because my obsession is not with bridal magazines or designer dresses or rings. It has little to do with weddings at all. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever get married in a traditional sense. The government-addled institution reeks too much of patriarchy and privilege. For the Family Sociology course that I took spring term, I wrote a paper that might as well have been called “Statistical and Rhetorical Evidence that Getting Married is a Bad Idea.” As a result, The Meaning of Wife and The Trouble with Normal provide a constant grumble of reasons why I should not want to be a wife. Alas, instead of obsessing over the perfect location for a reception, I obsess over not getting married and alternatives to marriage at the same time as I hope to form a long-term partnership.
I hate to admit this, but the further I get from being in a long-term lesbian relationship, the easier it seems to imagine a life in which I submit to marriage, if only for practicality’s sake. However, I would not want to have a wedding to pretend the marriage contract is about love; the legal marriage would be about mutual protection of assets. Nevertheless, I am open to other kinds of ceremonies and contracts that celebrate love, commitment, and oneness. Without a queer script for legal partnership, it became fun to imagine drawing up my own terms of commitment. Scripting potential commitment agreements remains a hobby of mine to this day. I recently read Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up, and was excited to find that she suggests drawing up agreements for partners in an open relationship so they know exactly to what they are committing. Why just limit this practice to non-monogamous relationships? I am hardly naive enough to think that love always survives or even stays in the same form. I’m not in any rush to pledge my whole life away to another person, but it would be nice to agree to and celebrate our commitment on our own terms.
I hope to write up some sort of an agreement with Devin before I move to New York and we embark on a long-distance relationship. We’ve been doing reading on this subject as well as the subject of non-monogamous relationships (thus Taormino’s book), and have decided that we’re going to stay monogamous for now, but are open to change that best suits our relationship. While the possibility of change does not appeal to the side of myself that watched the same Disney movies as Bridezilla as a child, it appeals to my commitment-scripting queer imagination. I am terribly excited to be with someone who is willing to let our relationship evolve as we change. Why do we always use longevity and monogamousness as the measurement for depth of love and commitment? Though I have at times struggled with taking my relationship with Devin as it comes, these nearly-five months of being with him has set a new standard for how I want to interact with those I love. Whether we last or not, I know I will regard him as a great love of my life.
I have been watching a lot of weddings from afar lately at both the Rose Garden at Julia Davis Park and at the gazebos in Kathryn Albertson Park. Yesterday, I came to an Anne Carson-esque definition of “wedding” as “an excuse to wear white lace in the decadent wild while your loved ones coo with the doves at the surrounding bouquet.” For the first time I can remember, I wanted a wedding, but only to celebrate Love in a beautiful place. My extended family, like many families I know, only seems to get together for weddings and funerals. Growing up, I was always more likely to envision my funeral than my wedding. While I’ve always been a relationship-person– one of those people who is especially skilled at serial monogamy– I’ve never given much thought to location or dresses or bridesmaids. When I recorded my CD at 17, I remember agreeing with the producer that weddings were nothing more than extravagant parties to say “hey, we love one another, give us gifts.” I didn’t fight for my right for “my day”; I didn’t believe it should be that way. I didn’t believe my mom when she said that her wedding was the happiest day of her life, especially when she divorced and rewrote the history of her relationship to be congruent with her present feelings. I want my entire relationship to be a process that writes itself, without a wedding pinnacle, without destructive revision in the end. I will probably face heartbreak again someday, but I know it will be less rattling when its not complicit with fairy tale expectations.
Still, I’m learning the value of creating my own ceremonies. Sera Beak talks about this a lot in The Red Book, and I have found it valuable to mark life transformations with rituals. Would it be giving into patriarchal (and otherwise…) expectations if Devin and I traded rings or bracelets to remind each other of one another and mark our commitment? I’ve done it before, I suppose. Molly and I wore Hello Kitty “Best Friends” rings. Last summer, Ryan and I got very serious about sham marriage and he gave me a ring…
Sham marriage is still an idea I’m interested in, as performance art and a political statement. One of the most frequently made arguments against gay marriage is that it lessens the value of heterosexual unions. The usual retort is that quickie Vegas marriages and their subsequent quickie annulments are what really devalue marriage. Sham marriage could also easily show the absurdity of this argument because it is legal for two consenting adults of the opposite sex to marry one another whether they really love one another or not. Does this devalue the marriages of those who marry for love? What about different kinds of sustaining love?
I would say that if I were to put my relationships into a hierarchy, my relationship with Devin would come out on top. But I don’t like hierarchies, and I have so many sustaining friendships that have been an equally powerful force in my life. I want a way to celebrate these as well. I suppose we do this on birthdays or through cards and letters, but why not celebrate the anniversary of friendships? I never established a Big Chill-esque group of friends in college, but I’ve had moments with my high school friends that remind me of that movie, albeit we are much younger and there has never been a funeral. Now that we’re getting older, we see each other less, but they still remain a force in my life. Wouldn’t it be swell if we could take a vacation to celebrate ten years of friendship? Twenty years? To celebrate being family?
I’ve come to understand that one of my own personal issues with marriage is that it seems an inadequate way to express oneness. I can literally write two bodies into one, but the government or the church proclaiming me and my significant other an entity does not establish a similar oneness. I’m really into oneness in a new age spiritual buzzword sort of way. I want my love for my significant other to open me up to the possibility of seeing love and extending love to everything, including those friends whose love also strengthens me.
So, even in this heterosexual-seeming relationship that I’m in right now, I have no desire to shut off my queer imagination in terms of expressing commitment and love. I strive to invent my own rituals and agreements that best reflect the nature of changing relationships. This is what my obsession is really about: learning to love someone fully with ever-deepening intimacy. This is what I want, more than a ceremony in a rose garden or a piece of paper calling two people one. Best of all, I get to experience this now without a gift registry or false promises of forever.
It has taken much longer to write this entry than I anticipated. My laundry is dry and needs to be put away. Nick is reading to me from the phone book and I still really want cantaloupe and Brokeback Mountain. I won’t get the cantaloupe, but at least I’ll get Ennis Del Mar before I start volunteering at Simply Cats tomorrow. Onwards.
