Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Hmmmmmm, and remaining relevant all the while (re: all the sex talk)

[Catherine Harper (tylik]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Grace Benjamin wrote:

> 3.  Marriage unto itself, and its specialness.
> 
> At the risk of an all out flame war; I would suggest that if you don't view 
> marriage as special and unique- you've never been married.  You may have had 
> a ceremony, you may have had a big party and a few kids... But you were 
> never married.  There is something special and sacred in it.  Anyone whose 
> ever been married will tell you that.  

Problem is, marraige is one of those words that means a lot of different
things to different people.  Some of it has to do with your relationship
to your community, some of it is religious, and some of it is legal.

I'm married.  Legally, religiously, in front of my friends and family... 
it's very very important to me.  But we almost weren't legally married at
all, and I feel a littlge guilty sometimes that we were, because I would
not legally be allowed to marry Craig if he happened to be a girl.  It's
easy for me to imagine cases where I would want to marry a girl.  Craig
happens to be a boy, we happened to have the privlege of marrying
available to us.  When we married, it was partly because of optimism over
developments in Hawaii, that turned out to be a tad bit premature.

Under other circumstances we would have had a similar ceremony that did
not include legal marraige.

People can express their commitment to eachother in a number of different
ways.  Marriage to me is too much a legal state defined by the larger
society to have room in it for everyone's needs...  and I'm more
interested in what different solutions people come up with than in seeing
people follow any particular one.

                                Catherine