Living in sin
One of my coworkers was recently telling us about her son’s impending engagement to his longtime sweetheart. It’s going to happen any day now. Her eyebrow turned a confidential arch as she detailed his plans for the proposal, and the engagement gift she wants to get them. She worried they’re too young, having just finished college, with years of grad school ahead of them. She sighed. She beamed. “They’re not shacking up, though,” she added. “They’re going to move in together after the wedding.”
“That’s good,” said another coworker. “That’s the way it should be.” General concurrence.
“Really?” I asked her in my quizzical way, not just because this woman lived with her boyfriend for a year before he recently became her husband.
“I think it’s the ideal. I mean, I admire people who can do that.”
“It’s great if they want to wait. But I don’t think there’s any one right way. I just think people should do whatever works best for them,” I shrugged.
“Well, yeah. I do too. I just think it’s really classy when people wait to live together,” she asserted. Another shrug from me. “It’s just classier,” she tasted the word again.
As I went back to my work, I wondered what’s “classy” about abstaining from sex before marriage. Indeed, what’s classy about not even abstaining from sex, but maintaining plausible deniability that you’re having it with the person you love. It just doesn’t compute for me.
Let me take a moment to tell you that I’m actually pro-marriage. I’ve had several conversations recently leading me to suspect that a lot of people get the opposite impression from me. People who read my blog might think this because I’ve written that marriage isn’t something I consider important to the continued stability of society. Or possibly because I also stated that a free stand mixer was a perfectly valid reason to enter the sacred institution of matrimony. Or maybe just because I’m so obviously cynical.
But honestly? I’m thrilled when people get engaged. I will squee right along with the best of them when two people I love want to exchange vows. In this society just the word “wife” or “husband” has more heft, more meat to it than “girlfriend” or “boyfriend”, and this is fact. I’m not immune to it, whether I can intellectually justify it or not.
But also, there’s this innate power in having said “You and me, okay? For as long as we keep breathing. This is the goal.” You can make that commitment without being officially married, of course, and I respect that choice as well, but when you’re married you’re more or less asking people to automatically assume it. And that’s powerful too. However it might seem when I’m snarking, I’m pro-optimism and pro-love and pro-commitment. So Yay Marriage! Yay Marriage between any two or more people who want to make that promise to one another.
Is it for me personally? I don’t know. To me, marriage is largely just like any relationship, but with a stated goal (which may or may not work out) and all those little perks like possible tax breaks, legal status, and the ability to easily share insurance benefits. In and of itself, it is neither scary nor numinous. In my able-bodied early twenties I guess I used to think it would be really great to have that kind of bond and goal with someone. Like, hypothetically. But since becoming chronically ill, it feels uncomfortable to even think about asking for that degree of commitment from anyone. I’m aware that I’m not the best long-term investment*. So I don’t know. Probably not.
But I am pro-marriage for you, if you’re into it. I promise.
However, I have to say it once again: I don’t think being married makes anyone better than non-married people. I don’t believe it sanctifies sexual union. I don’t think that living together and sharing a life before you’re (or instead of being) married is tacky or sinful or intrinsically sub-ideal or anything of the sort. I think it’s just what works best for some people and their relationships, which really aren’t my business anyway. Just another choice in a world full of possibilities.
You want to protect marriage? Don’t play nuptial keep away with the homosexuals. Don’t freak out because a woman wants two husbands. Don’t judge couples for having pre- or lieu-of-marital sex. Cluck not about unwed mothers. In observing these prohibitions, perhaps you’ll find that every time people get married, it gets to be beautiful and meaningful to them. Never perfunctory. Never to appease public opinion. Stop making it about you and your expectations. It may surprise you that your marriage can still be what you and your partner/s and your God and your culture want marriage to be. You’re just finally giving the same courtesy to the rest of us.
Because if you, the judgment mongers of the world, keep picking at marriage, trying to reduce it to your own definitions and rules, it really is going to unravel. And all that’s left will be people trying to love each other and be happy. And I have this strange foreboding that in the end, that will be perfectly fine with everyone but you.
*These statements do not in any way apply to all or indeed any other disabled or chronically ill people. Just to be clear, I am talking about myself only.
