I Don't Believe in Marriage -- Here's Why I (Grudgingly) Got Married Anyway

By Amy Williams, AlterNet. Posted July 22, 2009.

The last wedding I attended was in June 2008, and I remember standing there after the ceremony with pangs of jealously and confusion as I thought about my own long-term relationship. At that point, I had been living with my partner for two years, and we were getting ready to move out to Ithaca, N.Y., so he could start work on a Ph.D. at Cornell University.

I considered myself to be in the same ranks as my wedded friends because I too was part of a stable, long-term partnership. Even so, my diamond-free left hand left friends, colleagues and family members scratching their heads, questioning why I hadn't (or when I planned to!) shimmy down the aisle. 

Now don't get me wrong, I wanted to partake in all of the tangential benefits of a white wedding. When my sister got married, her apartment was literally overflowing with gifts: New china, linens from Macy's, and a few thousand dollars in gift certificates. When my partner I moved across the country together from California to Ithaca, we got a $150 gift certificate to Bed Bath & Beyond and a set of pots and pans from a sympathetic relative.

Other than that, we were on our own with my savings while I looked for a job, and my partner's graduate-student salary. We bought an air mattress for our unfurnished apartment and stocked our kitchen with garage-sale dishware. 

New kitchen utensils would have been nice, yes, but the promise of material goods wasn't quite bribe enough for us to participate in a sexist institution that held little religious or cultural significance for us. A marriage certificate is no guarantee of a successful, happy, or even long-term bond anyway -- so why did it matter that a priest/judge/rabbi/pastor hadn't presided over our union?

The prospect of marriage seemed especially unpleasant given the omnipresence of social conservatives like James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly and others who have successfully made their careers by demonizing gay couples as hedonists, single moms as irresponsible and cohabitating couples as selfish.

Not getting married seemed to be a viable way of fighting these fierce social stigmas because, through our relationship, we could show our friends and family that marriage doesn't have to be a component of a happy, successful partnership. 

I was proud of our relationship sans marriage certificate. My partner and I both wore aprons in the kitchen and supported each other's ambitions.
We accepted the fact that our partnership, our deal, like any marriage, could fall apart -- but we vowed to be honest and open with each other and to commit ourselves to each other for as long as we could.

Opting out of marriage hardly seemed subversive -- at least while we were in the cozy bubble of our private home. Outsiders, however, weren't quite as thrilled with our makeshift union.

While my friends' and cousins' engagements were praised with unquestioning "CONGRATULATIONS!!!" on fancy cards and Facebook wall posts, my relationship was rather unremarkable, if not cause for concern. Many seemed to think that my partner just needed a little encouragement in the marriage department, as though I were a damsel in distress, and that I (really) was just dying for the day that I too could dress up in white and say "I do!" in front of smiling loved ones.

I wanted to blame films like Twenty-Seven Dresses and My Big Fat Greek Wedding for brainwashing my friends and family into believing that a wedding is (of course!) the climax of a sexual relationship. But I knew that my aversion to marriage was uncomfortable for everyone else because it blurred the lines between "legitimate" and "illegitimate."

As a couple, we acted in ways that typical marrieds acted. We cooked together, lived together, slept together. And yet our relationship just didn't measure up. We were partners, yes, but lacked the language to express our relationship in terms other than "boyfriend" and "girlfriend." We were still identified as "dating," i.e. "not serious," by the outside world.

See more stories tagged with: sex, gender, discrimination, sexism, marriage, relationships, same-sex marriage

Amy Williams is a freelance writer.

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