This FAQ needed a whole post to itself

[liv]

What are the political implications of getting engaged to be married?

I would like to pretend that my intended marriage is just an arrangement between me and my fiancé, and has no effect on anyone else. I would like to, but in honesty I can't, because although we are by far the most affected, marriage is by its nature a public act. Getting married does send out messages to the world at large. The most prominent is that I love jack and intend to build a life with him; that's entirely true and I have no problem with it. But there are a whole load of other connotations I don't really agree with. People would have some justification in arguing that going along with getting married in spite of this could be doing actual harm. I've wrestled with my conscience on this, and I have concluded that the primary message about my commitment to jack outweighs all these potentially negative secondary messages. But it's only on balance, it's not an absolute conviction.

As a woman / as a feminist:
In the society I live in, marriage tends to be a somewhat awful transaction, where women are offered the opportunity of being princesses for a day, in exchange for giving up the rest of their lives to their husbands and children. It almost goes without saying that I think that's a terrible set-up, and I don't intend my marriage to be like that at all. But I can't just decide on my own that I'm going to have a relationship called a "marriage" which doesn't share many of the features most people associate with the concept of marriage.

The counter to that argument is that I'm hardly the first person to think of a marriage as a mutual egalitarian partnership, or to think of a wedding as a chance to spend time with people dear to me. My hope is that if more and more people treat marriage as the beginning of a future together, rather than the culmination of their life's ambition in a grand romantic gesture, the consensus definition of marriage will gradually shift. It's happening to a great extent already; I have plenty of married friends whose relationships look nothing like the romance novel / Hollywood / gossip magazine view of marriage. I hope I can make a (small) positive contribution by acting as a role model for some of the possibilities open to married women in the modern world, rather than a (small) negative contribution by appearing to support a rather sexist institution.

As a Queer person:
Many activists have argued, with some conviction, that it's wrong for opposite-sex couples to take advantage of a privilege not offered to same-sex couples. I do take this argument seriously, but in the end, I don't think anyone will particularly care if I "boycott" marriage until there is full marriage equality for people of all gender combinations. I would like to find some more meaningful activism that I can engage in, because I don't think refusing to get married is actually going to do anything to help people who experience discrimination and disadvantage due to being Queer. For a start, if I end up getting that stupid marriage bribe from the government, I'm going to spend it on activist, possibly even marriage-questioning, causes! If I have a visible, serious opposite-sex relationship, I get loads of privilege from that anyway, regardless of whether or not I call it marriage.

Being married will of course make everyone assume I'm straight even more than they already do. It will probably also make random strangers assume that I am planning to have children and that I'm planning to avoid any kind of intimate relationships with people other than my future husband. Then again, people make stupid assumptions about me (and others) all the time. I do feel a little bit as if I'm "selling out", but only a little bit, and I don't think I'm being rational in feeling like that.

As a Jewish person:
Perhaps surprisingly, my relationship with jack hasn't really changed my general views about mixed relationships / marriages. I still think there are some meaningful, serious downsides for a committed Jewish person in a romantic relationship with a non-Jewish partner. I have a great deal of sympathy for people who, when single, insist on dating only other Jews. At the same time, I believe as firmly as I ever did that communities punishing or outright excluding members who choose to marry non-Jews, let alone children of such couples, is absolutely unjust, and on a pragmatic level entirely counterproductive. The problem with intermarriage from the community perspective is that it somewhat increases the chance of people becoming alienated from Judaism and community life; deliberately alienating people makes this problem vastly worse and not a bit better!

The problem with intermarriage from the personal perspective is to do with having a partner who doesn't share an important aspect of your life. I've decided that in my case the slight downsides are worth the benefits of a relationship with jack (not a relationship with a hypothetical non-Jewish person in the abstract). Anyway, the point is that I'm not marrying him because I'm rejecting Judaism or anything like that. At the same time, I do expect that being married to someone who isn't Jewish is going to cause some amount of friction with the Jewish community at some point in my life.

In general, I am aware that marriage has a lot of baggage attached to it. I still want to get married, because I want to make a public commitment to be part of jack's life in the long term, and marriage seems like the closest fit to what we want, even if it's far from perfect. In some ways I'd prefer it if civil partnerships or something like the French PACS were available to opposite-sex couples. But I would be a total hypocrite to complain about that, given how many people are excluded from any kind of marriage altogether, and how many advantages I get from having access to a relationship model which is recognized pretty much everywhere in the world.

Comments

[hairyears]

I do not doubt that you and Jack will build your marriage the way you want it, rather than living in a confining construction of other peoples' expectations.

Every marriage that succeeds in this changes the institution of marriage and opens it up, little by little.

Meanwhile, I worry about religious communities that discourage 'marrying out' - at the very least, they should be glad that they are, in part, 'marrying in' a potential new joiner; it reveals a lack of confidence in the advantages of their beliefs their way of life that they disregard the possibility that someone who loves one of their members might like them, too. Also, some of the smaller religious communities in the United Kingdom really, *really* need the genes.

[liv]

I do largely agree with you that, treated right, mixed marriages can bring real benefits to the community. But I'm a little uncomfortable with talking about people "needing the genes"; it smacks of eugenics and it's also rather a rude way to talk about other people's communities.

But thank you for your encouraging words about marriage and expectations!