When you say I do, what are you really saying?
There was an article in the NYT by a woman writing about how she and her partner call each other wife. It’s an interesting predicament with same-sex couples, there is a way you refer to each other among friends, family, strangers, clerks, phone clerks, etc. It never comes out exactly right with any of them. Some friends of mine opted to not get married after ten years and instead had a jump the broom ceremony, which harkens back to the days when slaves couldn’t marry and so to mark the ceremony they jumped a broom to show their community commitment. And he always calls her “mi novia” which I think sounds great.
After all what it is about is announcing you are entering the threshold of serious coupledom to your friends and family and beyond. Or is it? It’s also about health insurance, inheritance, power of attorney, and all sorts of issues that just don’t come from deciding to be a couple and live together.
I have been married three times, each time I was about to walk down the aisle I felt as if someone was slipping a yoke around my neck, even though actually I always liked being married. We live in a state that doesn’t allow us to get married – I know that this will change in the near future, but in the meantime, do we want to get married?
There is a part of me that says no, we don’t because marriage is bourgeois, and because it is a creation of convention, because it is meaningless unless it has meaning, which translates into why do it if you don’t need it? A long time ago, I was on a business trip in New York and a colleague asked me why I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring (I was married), I didn’t want to get into the long story behind it, the rings we picked from my brother’s fax because we had decided to marry right away rather than wait, the rings that we never really liked so quit wearing, but instead I said I don’t need a wedding ring to know I am married. The colleague said, but everyone else needs it to know you are.
We live in society regardless how often I like to flaunt society’s norms. In this article in the NYT, the woman was making the case that she had started calling her partner, wife, and she knew it was an affront to many. The sad part of the article was that she was standing in line for the superslide while her daughter was with her wife, and a stranger she was chatting with asked her where her daughter had gone to and she flinched. Should I say partner so she isn’t uncomfortable, because it is still nebulous to say partner, do I say wife and have her deal with it, and the author opted to say partner in the end, risking two steps backwards for her and everyone like her.
It was sad to read this but I totally understood what she was saying. Having just entered a same sex relationship at 49 years of age, my initial impulse was to say GIRLFRIEND to whoever was listening, then I watched how T maneuvered through the world, under the radar, and at first I was furious, but then I started noticing how many gay people were doing the same thing, flying under the radar. I also found myself in situations where I was speaking to someone about something completely banal and to say my GIRLFRIEND was to turn the conversation into something else.
It’s sickening really to think that all of these contrivances are necessary – marriage, ring, wife. Better to be like my good friend and neighbor who says, “I’m here, I’m queer, now deal with it.”
Will T and I get married and be each other’s wives? I guess anything is possible. Right now there is no legal same-sex marriage in New Orleans, that will change, (you read it here first), one day when it is legal, we might decide that we want to get married, not to confirm our love to each other, but to affirm to the society we live in that we are here, we are queer, we are in love, come celebrate with us our joy!