on marriage

With all the hoo-hah going on in the sates just now about same sex marriages, and with our own government lumbering toward a compromise of sorts, I've been doing some thinking about the issue and trying to figure out how I feel about it, so since this thing is a mechanism for a) helping me do just that and b) soap-boxing the results to the world, I figured I'd be topical and actually talk about something rather than nothing for a change.

When I was young me and my sister (who in those days lived happily in each others pockets) would often talk about the future. I can remember marriage being one of those big Important Future Things we'd talk about sometimes. I remember us each testing out our thoughts on the other, and engaging in long and ernest discussions about them - some days we were just like that... I came to the conclusion pretty early on that (unlike my sister) marriage didn't really matter to me for myself, while at the same time wholly accepting that it did for her: we were after all brought up to be pretty open minded individualistic little philosophers. Back then there were a few pieces of the puzzle missing for me in my grasp of the arguments (details like the gender of my hypothetical partner for example) but I think the fundamentals were there all the same. I also think I had it utterly wrong.

My argument always ran that marriage wasn't important to me, because I didn't buy into the institutions surrounding it as necessary validators of my own personal feelings (no, I probably didn't use those exact words but that was the gist) Of course if it mattered to the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with I'd happily go along with it, but I felt that I didn't need or want it. What I think I was doing then as a kid trying to figure out the world and my future in it, is what I think the US administration are doing now: namely confusing marriage with a particular set of personal values and religious ceremonies rather than the broader universally human idea those ceremonies were created to service.

This morning I was reading 'round the few blogs I sometimes read which belong to people I've never met, one in particular struck me as accidentally summing up for me exactly what it is that I've been uncomfortable with in this discussion - Meg isn't talking about this particular issue but what she says resonates all the same because just as marriage isn't about the specific religious beliefs attached to it by any one group and their ceremonies, it equally isn't about the 'civil union' aspects of legally legitimising a relationship, it's not about any of the external reasons at all - it's about two people being in love and wanting to announce and cement that among the people who matter to them. Denying any one group that basic civil right is plain wrong, just as Wil so elloquently explains.

who'd have thought that it'd be politics that'd turn me into a romantic?

So marriage does matter to me after all, and not for all those "fundamental institution" reasons that Bush is getting so agitated about having devalued, or for the "equal under the law" reasons which seem to be at the foreground in the public debate. It matters because when and if I meet someone and fall in love with him, I want to be able to share that with the people who matter to me, in the same way that I was so sure I wouldn't need to when I was too young to understand what exactly it might be when I found it.