Why would I get married?

An apropos comic from 1963, about a month and a half before my parents married

After objecting in principle to marriage for a long time, I had a shift in perspective a while back and decided it would be a good idea to marry my then-sweetheart-now-wife Linda. How did this happen?

Lots of people have asked and I've answered lots of different ways as I've explored my thoughts on the subject and experimented with how to explain them. Yesterday I thought of what seemed like the best, clearest explanation yet, but now the idea feels hard to explain again. I'll give it a shot anyway, starting with some background on my objections.

One of the things I've always objected to about marriage is that it's accorded a legitimacy not granted to other ways of being an intimate partner in someone's life. The history of marriage as a property transaction between a man and the father of a woman, the history of marriage as a religious institution, the default interpretation of marriage as a monogamous union, the attachment of legal status to marriage and the attendant government interference in one's private life, and the widespread restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples all deeply undermine its legitimacy as an institution and its attractiveness to me. I didn't and still don't want any part in supporting those things even though I grew willing to get married. On top of that, marriage can have negative tax consequences.

Then there's another layer of trouble when you get married: People expect a certain order of things. A ceremony. A party. Things that involve lots of planning and work and money.

So with those compelling arguments against marriage, how could I decide to do it? It's hard to explain but the more Linda and I talked about it, the more it seemed like fun and the more my objections seemed to recede into the background of my feelings about it. Worries over the legal consequences should we ever split up just never seemed to materialize for me, and the process of organizing a big party that we kick off by telling a hundred or more of our best friends how much we love each other started to seem like fun more than work.

Here are some of the advantages that make a difference to me. They do nothing to answer my objections (indeed many of them *are* my objections inasmuch as unmarried couples don't get them), but I guess by now I've done my part to prove marriage isn't necessary for strong relationships, nor for difficult breakups. It still bums me out that it's so much harder for unmarried couples (including gay couples) to get these things, but I guess I decided somehow it's OK for me to enjoy them as the fruits of marriage:

Marriage gets legal recognition for our roles in each other's lives. Even though these benefits are mostly available through private contracts, etc., Linda and I weren't doing the work to put those things in place, and the risk of needing to make life-or-death decisions on each other's behalf but not being allowed to has bugged us for a long time.

Marriage gets social recognition and makes our relationship easier for others to understand (or at least think they understand). When I tell someone Linda is my girlfriend or partner or co-mortgagee or lover, many people don't know what to make of it. Most are polite, but feel those words raise unanswered questions. That's fine -- people need to live more comfortably with ambiguity anyway. But it's more comfortable (and fewer syllables) to just say "wife." Even though that word leaves a lot of questions unanswered, too, most people don't even realize it and feel satisfied with their assumptions about what that word means. And of course some of their assumptions are true in our case.

It gets business recognition: Linda will be able to get better health insurance more cheaply through my plan at work than she has now.

Marriage means something to Linda that other ways of being a couple apparently don't. We've only been married two days so there's more to learn here, but I think it will make pooling our money easier for her. She didn't want to buy nor wear our gorgeous wedding rings unless we were actually married. And I think we're both looking forward to simpler accounting now that our most of our income is community property.

In the end it could be that much as I don't want it to, marriage means something to me, too, that other ways of being a couple don't. How else could it be that with the right bride, the all-too-real problems with the institution just don't seem to matter much at all?