The Marriage Project, Reflection 57: “Our society thinks in terms of coupledom, and of coupledom being the holy grail of adulthood, and this is very damaging to all women, not just those of us who don’t marry.”

Stephanie Schroeder is a queer feminist dyke writer, mental health advocate, & activist for social and economic justice. Schroeder’s political essays have been anthologized in the queer classic, That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and Here Come the Brides: Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage. She is currently a Contributing Editor at Curve Magazine and a relationship and sex blogger on curvemag.com. Her first  book is Beautiful Wreck. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

How did you arrive at the decision to not get married? How firm are you in this decision?  

Getting or being married has never been in my consciousness. My family of origin never placed any emphasis on it for me and my two sisters like any other families do. And, growing up lesbian and feminist I found (and still do) the idea, the concept and the institution of marriage totally repugnant. It is outdated and useless for modern women. Plus, the history of marriage for women is atrocious, it has positioned women as the property of men. There is no way to reform or redeem the institution – or to queer it. There’s nothing queer about marriage, but everything that is dangerous to queers, state involvement in our personal relationships, now even the church is involved in places such as Denmark. It’s frightening to think so many LGBT people are embracing this traditional model of relationship because, to me, a lot of what is queer about queer relationships is that they are outside of the mainstream and outside of marriage. There’s no changing my mind.

Where did you get your thoughts about marriage?

As I mentioned, my family of origin wasn’t big on it. My parents transmitted the idea that my sisters and I were all independent agents and didn’tneed the support of anyone else to make our lives full and whole. Over the years, as so-called “marriage equality” has taken over the LGBT community, it’s been on my mind more…I am not only opposed ot marriage, but see this move by the gaystream as extremely short-sighted in terms of any strategy for “civil rights.”

What do you say to folks who ask you when you’re getting married?

I just say I’m not interested in getting married. If they want to hear more (which they never do) I have a lot to say on the subject.

Why do you think there’s such a stigma against women who aren’t married/choose not to be married? How do you think this stigma has affected you?

There is the idea that women who aren’t married “can’t get a man” or are somehow limited without a male (or another female) appendage. Our society thinks in terms of coupledom, and of coupledom being the holy grail of adulthood, and this is very damaging to all women, not just those of us who don’t marry. It’s a total scam run by men to keep women in bondage and now the same scam has reached lesbians and I’m really not sure why any of us would or should be interested in this withering institution. The stigma as not affected me because I don’t much care what other people think about me.

What are your feelings on the word “spinster”?

Well, some feminists like Mary Daly and other tried to reclaim it. There’s the publisher Spinsters Ink and I love that name, but in broader society “spinster” has a hugely negative connotation–again, a woman who cannot “get a man” (or woman) and poor, defective thing she is…a total loser because she has not coupled up with another human being.

tuesday

The Marriage Project, Reflection 56: “It’s true we’d be just as committed either way, and that we don’t need it, but there is a little tiny something to knowing that we made that choice.”

DS lives in New York. 

Why did you decide to get married?  

We decided to get married initially for legal reasons – because my partner has a complicated relationship with her living blood relatives in New York, and since she was moving back to New York to be with me she wanted them to not be her only next of kin should g-d forbid someone need to make a decision about her health, etc. Although there are proxies and other ways of doing paperwork to assign me that role, marriage is an automatic way to show up in someone’s hospital record, etc., and it felt like a solid protection in that way.  We also are trying to become parents and as dykes, it is not automatic that both names go on the birth certificate. Even though we will also do second parent adoption because that is the only legally binding course to custody, there is something nice about automatically being able to put both of our names on the birth certificate because we are married.  I never, ever thought I would get married, as my long time ex and many friends can attest (I have been many, many weddings of friends both queer and not – even as a bridesmaid a few times – and although I have enjoyed them I always have felt the need to make a private speech about the ways I think they are weird or counterintuitive, or what’s the point). I maintain that my politics around it have not really changed. Neither of us feels like we needed to get married to be committed, and if we lived in a place where it was not legal we would not have sought it out, but when it passed here it just seemed to make sense and so we chose it, and marched down to Brooklyn Borough Hall with my 89 year-old father as the witness (which was an additional benefit that he got to participate, because it was important for both of us that he see that my partner is committed to me and to him as well).  There was no fanfare  - we went out to an early dinner with him afterwards, nothing fancy, and then shopping at Trader Joe’s. Whether or not we will have a party eventually is up for debate, and I am surprising myself by kind of wanting to, although I do not feel strongly about it and we haven’t put any energy really into discussing it – I guess I am interested but it is not a priority right now. And it would be super casual, because some of what I find so problematic about marriage is actually how people go about doing their weddings, the idea of this being the most important day of your life and all that just doesn’t resonate for me on a common sense level and seems more like pressure than fun. Whether or not we will do any ritual I also do not know – neither of us cared about having a real ceremony, and my partner is not Jewish, but we have talked a bit about possibly signing a ketubah some day, and while we didn’t really have special vows, we have talked about what explicit commitments we are making to each other in an ongoing way through this process. 

What did you think marriage would be like?

I thought about it very little actually  - it just seemed like a good idea and so we picked it, I was surprised to be choosing it but had no apprehension or questions or hesitation about making a commitment to my partner, and it’s really not different in any ways I can think of that matter than if we lived together and were committed in a long-term way but not married. 

Where do you think you got your ideas/concept/narrative about marriage?

I have thought about this a bunch and I think a lot of them may have come from my parents – they had a loving, sometimes tumultuous marriage, but my father got married later in life for his generation (close to 50) and my mother died young. He was much older than her and they were married for 14 years but he never remarried and was a very independent bachelor before and after. So even though I have been in long partnerships, I think I was not raised to think that marriage was the be all, end all expectation for me at all, which I think it rare. My father even discouraged us at first, saying we were rushing into it.  

How do you feel about the word “wife”?

I feel surprisingly playful about it. I used to make fun of queers who called each other wife, and even thought about having a butch “husband” if i ever did marry – but my partner is gender queer but very woman identified and although we usually just say partner or girlfriend we occasionally use wife and I actually find it rather endearing. 

Why did you make the decision you made about your name?

Neither of us wanted to change our last names – Hers is her mothers maiden name chosen for personal reasons, and mine is my father’s and is also important to me. Each of our last names also indicates our ethnicity, and as a person of color (chicana) who is often read as white, I think keeping her name is additionally significant to her. Although we haven’t started doing this in too many places yet we have agreed to put each other’s last names into our respective names as additional middle names. So it wouldn’t be hyphenated, but I like it because it’s another way for us to be connected as a family (although it doesn’t feel necessary). We don’t know yet what we will do as a last name for children, that will be interesting to figure out as circumstances emerge…  

Do you think your relationship with your partner has changed since you got married?

See above – I think it’s the same as it would have been if we hadn’t gotten married, pretty much. Our relationship has more changed around the fact that she moved cross country from a place where she owned a house and lived for 20 years to be with me, which was a huge show of long-term commitment after being long distance for the first year and a half of our getting to know each other and getting seriously involved. So that, and living together, trying to get pregnant, having a dog together, her getting to know and love my dad, me getting to know and love her godson, all those things have impacted our relationship more than just the act of getting married. It’s not nothing at all though, I guess. It’s true we’d be just as committed either way, and that we don’t need it, but there is a little tiny something to knowing that we made that choice. That piece is not dominant, but not non-existent either, and it’s hard to explain… 

What have you learned about yourself since you’ve been married?

I just learned I had a lot more to say about this than I’ve put to paper anywhere else in the last bunch of months since we got married! It’s great getting a chance to think through these reflections in a structured way – I think I am learning a lot about myself in my relationship to my partner all the time, but again mostly in ways that have everything to do with my commitment to the person that she is and what that offers me and very little to do with the fact that we are married. But I guess something else I have learned is that there are things that make sense to me about having made the decision to get married, which I never thought I would do, and which therefore feels confusing sometimes… 

more spying (photos by me)

(Rao’s, Amherst, MA. Unidentified dude.)

(East Village, NYC. I’m trying to look up more.)

(This place is in the East Village, next to the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop. They sell this.)

you’re not special, and also,this speech is sexist.

So, this has been running around the internet lately, and because even I have to have a limit on the amount of media I consume, I ignored it. Apparently it’s provocative that David McCullough told some high school graduates in a wealthy white Northeast suburb that they’re not special, and it caused a big hullabaloo. What no one seemed to notice, though, was the not so thinly veiled sexism in the first part of the speech. (Full disclosure-my extremely smart friend T pointed this out to me in an email earlier today.)

Shall we take a look? Let’s. 

“So here we are… commencement… life’s great forward-looking ceremony. (And don’t say, “What about weddings?” Weddings are one-sided and insufficiently effective. Weddings are bride-centric pageantry. Other than conceding to a list of unreasonable demands, the groom just stands there. No stately, hey-everybody-look-at-me procession. No being given away. No identity-changing pronouncement. And can you imagine a television show dedicated to watching guys try on tuxedos? Their fathers sitting there misty-eyed with joy and disbelief, their brothers lurking in the corner muttering with envy. Left to men, weddings would be, after limits-testing procrastination, spontaneous, almost inadvertent… during halftime… on the way to the refrigerator. And then there’s the frequency of failure: statistics tell us half of you will get divorced. A winning percentage like that’ll get you last place in the American League East. The Baltimore Orioles do better than weddings.)”

The take away: 

Weddings are only for ladies. Dudes do not care. You’re lucky if they show up wearing pants. Or at all. If we were to involve Dudes in wedding planning, they’d just mess everything up by being Dudes. It’s HILARIOUS to imagine Dudes expressing emotion, or enjoying something that might involve emotion or anything that’s not grilling, going to the bathroom or sports. They just refuse to engage with such things.  This is  how all men are, it’s part of being masculine. Flexibility in gender presentation doesn’t exist, at least not in heterosexual men. Who’s is foisting these “unreasonable demands” on the groom? I bet it’s ladies, with our materialism, insatiable baby-lust and all our unmanageable feelings. (Ladies: We Ruin Everything. )

The Marriage Project, Reflection 55: “I know they’re wondering why I can’t keep a man, since I can cook AND possess a pretty impressive set of breedin’ hips.”

M is 30 and lives in Eastern Kentucky.

How did you arrive at the decision to not get married? How firm are you in this decision?

I thought about getting married once. A boy I loved asked and I said yes and I thought about me in an amazing dress being showered by wildflowers out in some romantic spot in the woods in the fall, just as the leaves were turning. I think it’s easy to get swept up in the glamour women often can’t help but associate with weddings. I never got past the daydreaming stage, though. There was no ring and no serious planning and eventually, there was a melodramatic break-up in the middle of my twenty somethings. I jokingly tell people that I’m glad I dodged the bullet. They laugh and I laugh, but I totally mean it. “Decision” may be a strong way to describe my thoughts on marriage, because I do firmly believe that life is unpredictable and that sometimes making decisions is a fruitless effort. Who knows, I might end up drunk and hitched in a chapel in Vegas someday, in spite of the way I loathe cliche. However, I can’t see myself getting married. I can’t imagine it anymore. I don’t feel as though I need a government issued certificate to verify my love. I don’t like the idea of changing my name, or even discussing changing my name. I suppose it’s easy to say that I highly value my independence, but it seems more complicated than that. I firmly value love and loving, not an institution.

Where did you get your thoughts about marriage?

Marriage was always sort of looming growing up as a girl in Appalachia. Marriage is something that happens, it’s what you do. Even at eighteen when I was full of frustrated hormones and angst, I thought I’d probably be married by the time I was twenty five or so. I was surrounded by successful, happy marriages. Partnerships, really. My great grandparents and my grandparents and my parents were friends as well as spouses. Life wasn’t always idyllic, even happy couples are only human, but they always seemed to enjoy being with one another and sharing their lives and their love. I was flipping through a photo album with my Great Mamaw once and we came across a picture of her, holding hands with her first boyfriend Thurston. I asked, “Gramaw, why didn’t you marry him?” It was the 1920s, she was obviously of age for the age at fifteen or sixteen, I wondered if there was something that made this handsome young man unsuitable of her affections. She cocked her head and looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Well, I didn’t love him!” For me, marriage was presented as side by side with love and affection. I came from a family who believed in soul mates. And I myself was born a bastard, outside of wedlock, because my mother refused to marry my biological father. She resisted the pressure of the community and conventions and changed my life for the better by not giving in to a redneck romeo who overdosed in 2004. He was only human, too. Just not the “right one”. She married my stepfather when I was four years old and they’re celebrating an anniversary next week. Twenty six years, I think.

What do you say to folks who ask you when you’re getting married?

Ohhh, the pressure is on all of a sudden, since I turned 30. Folks ask me that question all the time. Typically, I just say “NEVERRR!” and we all have a good laugh about it. When I’m forced to answer in a more serious way, I just cop out and use that aforementioned “right one” excuse. Oddly I’ve found that the people asking are usually friends my own age or a little younger. They seem so excited to be married and starting adorable new families. I’m happy for them, genuinely. But it’s hard to explain through that glaze of nearly newlywed bliss that I don’t want the same things from life right now. The concern is sweet, the worry for my loneliness. I try to explain that “single” isn’t a dirty word. I enjoy my life just the way it is, I enjoy the time have recently taken for being alone. I have allowed plenty of room for possibility and happiness in the romance department should it present itself along the way. Pressure is a drag.

Why do you think there’s such a stigma against women who aren’t married/choose not to be married? How do you think this stigma has affected you?

Single women are scary! Grr! I mean, I suppose marriage is the comfortable option in our society for women. Marriage is widely accepted, even respectable and holy. Or at least that’s what we want to believe that we believe as Americans. Maybe a woman being unmarried makes people squirm uncomfortably. An unmarried woman is intimidating, unnatural in the mainstream swing of things. Personally, I get a lot of sad looks from doe-eyed little old ladies. They pat me on the arm like they’re mourning the death of my womanhood. Or like somebody just died. And i get a lot of little old men shaking their heads at me in bewilderment. I know they’re wondering why I can’t keep a man, since I can cook AND possess a pretty impressive set of breedin’ hips. The stigma bounces right off of me, most of the time. I’m confident in my choices and don’t put much stock in living up to conventional standards.

What are your feelings on the word “spinster”?

I kinda’ like it! It’s fun to say. I mean, the connotation seems negative. Crazy cat lady meets Miss Havisham, something that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. But I’ve chosen to embrace it. ‘Cause by Eastern Kentucky standards, being unmarried and childless at 30 makes me a spinster in a lot of eyes. I can tell that my Great Mamaw, who’s 96, is getting concerned about the “s” word. She had a sister who never married, a spinster. She owned a general store and used to give me free Coca Colas and those tiny cans of Beenie Weenies. I always thought she was a happy woman and only just realized that she had never married, didn’t even occur to me in my vague memory of her. I don’t like Gramaw worrying, but again, I think it’s more of an issue of concern. Her relationship with my great grandfather was literally awesome, as in awe inspiring. They were so funny and sweet together and so equally matched. She wants me to find that and her values insist it come with marriage.

“All that matters is the voices in your head. And writing down exactly what they say.” (Jami Attenberg)

(tea lounge, brooklyn. photo by me.) 

J yelled at me today when I told him I’m starting to freak out about turning 34 in less than six months. It did seem a little crazy after that, but I’m still not really sure about where the freak out is coming from. That’s not totally true. I’m not writing enough and I’m spending too much time comparing myself to other people instead of paying attention to my ball and where it’s going. The truth is that the people I think about all day, every day, do not ever leave, and if they did, I could figure out how to bring them back. So I’m deciding right now not to court the crazy anymore and just write. (I’ll let you know how it goes.)

When I was thirteen, I wrote a novel. It was terrible, but I was extremely loyal to it, instead of self conscious about its quality. I had no sense of risk. I’d write every night for hours and I didn’t edit myself and I didn’t worry about doing everything ever in five hundred words, or if I would be able to make the reader feel what I felt. I just wrote. I saved everything on a floppy disk (see? I’m old) and maybe I even slept well at night.

I am in something, but it feels tight and I’m worried about how to put in flesh and secrets and jewelry and pasts. I have to figure out how to step back and watch and let it grow on its own  and still manage to remain an involved parent. It’s just what needs to happen. I am terrible at trusting the process, but I am in it now.

The Marriage Project, Reflection 54: “We still feel like the same people we were when we got married.”

Liz Frazier is 30, lives in Kentucky, and loves her husband Mike and her dog Pickle.

Why did you decide to get married? 

I got married because my husband wanted to be married to me, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by turning down his proposal. He was drunk, three months into our relationship, after a Bob Dylan concert when he proposed, and I was mad at him for taking a friend instead of me, and he had to call back the next morning to confirm that I had said “yes,” but he had a stronger worry about “forever” than I did. We knew we wanted to spend our lives together early on, and I think that marriage seemed like a way to cement our devotion to each other. Honestly, it was more “we’re in love and this is what people do when they’re in love.”
What did you think marriage would be like?

I will admit that we both had fairy-tale ideas about life, and I’ve been lucky that they mostly have been true for us, but I have relatives and friends who have had the harder side of life, and their lives, in and of themselves, have been filled with rotten apples, broken glass slippers, and beasts who never turned into princes. Because of our friends and family, I should have been more cautious, but I wasn’t and gladly have had no need to be. I know, without a doubt, that my husband loves, appreciates, and respects me. After 11 years together, I still get butterflies.

How do you feel about the word “wife”?

I love it because when my husband refers to me as his “wife,” it is always with a glow of pure happiness. I know that in the real world this is almost a cliche or I could be labelled naive, but it is true. He is still happy that I am his wife, his life partner, his equal, and, as he just said when I asked him, “his cuddle bear.”

Why did you make the decision you made about your name?

I wanted to take his last name because he is the last in his family line and my last name was awkward, but I wanted to keep mine because I am also the last in my family line, so I pushed out my middle name and slid my last name into the middle name slot (where I like it a lot better), and took his last name. We played with names a lot, though. It felt goofy to have him take my last name, and I didn’t want the hassle of a hyphenated name, but this worked for me.

Do you think your relationship with your partner has changed since you got married?

I’m sure it has, but we are the essence of the “little old married couple.” We still feel like the same people we were when we got married. We have our share of life’s problems, but we get through them. As my mother-in-law says, “it’ll all come out in the wash.” For years, I always responded to that by saying, “Yes, but who has to do the washing?” Over time, though, I don’t question it. I have realized that even if we have done our best, we have no control over the outcome of some things. Things will either work out or they won’t, and we have to deal with it. One thing I am grateful for is the fact that we’ve never had a “I’m right, you’re wrong” type of argument.

What have you learned about yourself since you’ve been married?

I bitch, and he listens.

non consensual photography (by me)

 

In order from top to bottom: Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn Museum steps, 34th Street/Penn Station, Dekalb Market.

 

 

Outsourcing

The awesome Andrea Grimes, who writes the “Hitched” column at the Frisky, is looking for folks to interview for her next column on the single=miserable trope by talking to unhappily married/happily divorced women about how they feel about their choices/situations. If you’re interested, contact her at andrea.grimes@gmail.com.