When I was young, growing up in a small working-class town in the northwest of England, I used to obsessively collect bridal-wear inspiration torn from the pages of magazines. I always believed that my dress would be like nobody else’s: Viktor & Rolf custom perhaps; archive Jean Paul Gaultier, maybe; Galliano for Dior? A girl can dream. Eventually, I hit puberty and very swiftly realized that I wouldn’t be wearing a dress and I certainly wouldn’t be getting married any time soon as a gay boy in a world where marriage, for me and mine, was illegal.
After kissing a few frogs, I met and fell in love with someone who was actively anti-marriage—both politically and emotionally. This completely changed my understanding of marriage and what it means, so much so that I published a book about this very subject just last year. A book where I was able to ask a lot of questions, with the central one being, of course, why get married at all?
When my partner and I got together, it was still a year before same-sex marriage was legalized in the UK, and gays everywhere began donning white suits and doing flash mobs to Lady Gaga songs to celebrate their nuptials. And really, while gay marriage was a sign of turning tides from exclusion to inclusion, we still felt wary. Because when your life is spent swimming against the tide, you learn never to trust a calm sea. Sure, inclusion might initially feel like liberation—like the kid that bullied you at school finally sending you an apology message on Facebook—but what does it really mean? Does it just mean becoming friends with the bully? Well…in some ways yes. And in others, no.
It means your subsumption into a system that wasn’t really designed for you, and will never be designed for everyone equally. And really, while everyone assumes marriage to now be “equal,” it’s still pretty much impossible for a non-binary person (me) to get married using their actual pronouns, since there’s no legal way to register anything but she or he on a birth or marriage certificate. The same goes for trans men and women who haven’t been through the intensive process of changing all their documents to match their gender. Same goes for those in other territories who aren’t able to get married because of their sexuality, class, race, or religion. And so marriage equality remains a falsehood, a mirage.
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”?
But for some reason, I can’t wait. I really, really can’t wait. This isn’t because I believe our love to be more unique and special than anyone else’s and will therefore survive that nasty divorce statistic, nor is it because I believe that we haven’t been conditioned and pressured into the same wants and feelings as everyone else. It’s because it feels so thrilling to do something just because you want to. Not because it’s justifiable, not because it’s morally good—indeed, really it’s the opposite.
Back in January, we got drunk one night and said it to each other. The next morning, we sat bolt upright, hungover and gasping for water. Are we?… Did we? Initially, we decided it was only down to the alcohol, but we kept coming back to it. Perhaps we just wanted a commitment ceremony, or something to make sure we can’t leave the other with our wonderful, but very difficult, dog. But we decided that wasn’t it. We realized we enjoyed the audience of it, both as an opportunity to display our (usually quite private) love for each other, but also to promise parts of ourselves to each other in front of people we love.
We realized that what is important about this moment in our relationship is the act of the promise itself. What you promise is dependent on the couple, sure. And for us, our promise to each other is to change. It’s an active want to seek out and revel in how we evolve as we grow older together. It’s a promise that forever doesn’t exist, but unhappiness does—and we won’t ever do that together. It’s a promise that we can take those existing archaic structures and undermine them by being in an open relationship, by lying about my gender (which is how I’ve come to think of it) on my legal documents, and by making everyone bring food to the wedding. (Booze is provided, however.) It is a promise that love is not synonymous with control, but in fact with freedom. It’s a promise to work really hard to take power from the active redefinition of the role of marriage and commitment in our life together.
And finally, I guess in some ways it’s about the personal being political, and vice versa. See, in every generation we arrive at a time in our life when all our friends get married, and we are happy for them. But as far back as memory serves, queer people have not been allowed to do so. And so in a world where the security of this right seems flimsy—like so many others, as we have heartbreakingly seen over the last weeks—we’ve decided that now is the time to claim anything that is rightfully ours. To seek rights and licenses before they are stripped from us. To be here, and to be present, and to take those old structures and make them new and far more beautiful than they were before.