Marriage is an institution, it is not an emotion

Marriage is an institution, not an emotion. Let those who fall in love celebrate it the way they deem fit.

I must admit I'm feeling a wee bit ambivalent about posting this, which is why I waited so long. I'm now posting it with a different text.

Kay put it well in his entry. Marriage is not love. It's a lot of things: it's the ceremony we're used to seeing on television (Protestant ceremony: "dearly beloved, we are gathered here today..."), the Jewish breaking of the glass, hand-fasting, but it's also commitment for the rest of your life, it's divorce and spousal abuse, it's child brides and kidnapping and rape and marriages of convenience and arranged marriages.

rosefox also put it well, if more succinctly: marriage is promises. Love is why we make them.

I've seen so many marriages, that this trite little sentence is doing them all a veritable injustice. Marriage isn't love. Love brings you to marriage, perhaps, but that's not it. Marriage is work. Marriage is commitment. Marriage is tears and sweat and misunderstandings and reconciliations and joy and failure and success, all of it together. It's the partnership that's important in a marriage. "Love is marriage" just cheapens everything people work for in a marriage.


So, I will put the rainbow in my journal, but I will not simply repeat the words, which mean nothing.

I don't think the entire gay population will flock to the altar of an institution that has spat on them for so long. I for one want to get married, when the time is right. I've lived for a long time with the notion that I probably would get married, and I never had the time to properly get over that idea after coming out before gay marriage was allowed in Canada. So, for me, the idea has never been truly in the realm of the impossible, at an emotional level. I know it sounds weird, but that's that.

However, that doesn't mean I'll parrot stupid words like a record player. That meme made me profoundly uncomfortable, so I had to think about it for a few days to put my finger on it. :)