Marriage Should be Mourned not Celebrated: Or, don’t be Paranoid While Reading
Marriage seeps into our minds. From adolescence onward we are spoon-fed wedding dresses and tuxedoes. We rummage our minds on a quarterly basis to see who would be in our wedding party. Weddings are revered as the best night of our lives, a time when all who love us are celebrating us. The wedded leave the court adorned with gifts and graced with acceptance.
It comes as no surprise that when you’re twenty or older and in a romantic partnership for an extended period of time, you’re incessantly asked the question, ‘So, when are you and ___ going to tie the knot?’ Such a question comes about during a lull in a conversation with a coworker or within the first five-minutes of reunification with a relative or upon talking with a religious figure who, in an all too try hard voice, asks when you’re finally going to put down some roots.
The frequency of being asked this question depends on your geography, religious affiliations, sexual orientation, class, and race. Queer people are less likely to ask you the question. And, needless to say, you very well could have a quick and satisfying answer to the question: ‘Oh, we are planning on next summer’ or ‘Sometime after he finishes school we are going to get engaged.’
Coercion and Compulsion
I find the question and the compulsive posture that precedes the question infuriating. Marriage is all too often viewed as a step of growth, a sign of mutual commitment and maturity, as a mode of expressing love. Marriage is simply not that. For John Locke, who wrongly held that humans are not part of nature, marriage is what separates us from other beasts; and perhaps he is right insofar as other beasts are not capable of world-historic sadism. Couples repeatedly consign to marriage not because their relationship is lovely and thriving, but because they are coerced or ideologically compelled to do so. We may be able to think of married people who wedded on grounds that seem less than reprehensible, but that is more or less not important. What is at stake is why marriage is celebrated as sign of maturity, the natural end of romantic partnerships, a reflection of desire, and a sign of mutual commitment, when it is structurally a means of social atomization, a source of stabilization for capital, a way to continue the lovely white paterfamilias, an avenue to bolster the norms of heteronormativity and patriarchy; otherwise put, it is a way to reproduce this world.
Owing to our dystopian predicament (or, depending on who you ask, utopian predicament), people are economically and socially coerced into being married: the rent is too damn high to live alone, you need your partner’s workplace health insurance, tax exemptions would offer you a better quality of life, people will stop asking you when you’re going to get married. Such a fact of coercion makes the celebration and fetish of marriage all the more annoying. Shouldn’t marriage be an arrangement to be grieved and mourned? Is it not a vestige, no, the embodiment, of how fathers transfer property and wealth via the exchange of their daughter? Why is it that while we are either economically coerced and/or ideologically compelled into marriage, we nonetheless view the unmarried and long-term partners who have refused the politics of marriage as the epitome of uncommitted and immature?
We likely know of marriages that are neither the result of economic coercion, foolish decision making, nor the wet dreams of patriarchy. We may even know many marriages that function in a manner that is hostile to heteronormativity, social isolation, and capital accumulation. Some couples, including my friends who I deeply love and appreciate, may have aforementioned marriages, but that is not what is under examination. A type of caring desire, though rare, can subsist under marriage. However, what is being questioned is the role marriage plays in reproducing our world, a world that we should have no investment in, and why the unwedded, non-monogamous, and queer are uncelebrated and viewed as infantile. The privileges granted the married should be unconditionally extended to all and marriage, insofar as it is a structure predicated on keeping all this shit the same, should be mourned.
The Pope and the Prince
As someone who was raised in and out of Christian circles, I was told ad nauseum that marriage is a covenant before God. On this point, I briefly note that the founders of the Abrahamic faiths either hoped that people did not get married, such as Paul and Jesus, or that they most certainly did not have monogamy in mind, such as Muhammad and various figures in the Hebrew Bible. Moreover, saying that marriage is a ‘covenant before God’ should be the impetus to not be married. Covenants, for the Hebrews, and thus many traditions within the Abrahamic faiths, were viewed as an arrangement you did not want to be involved with. Covenants were, in many instances, either arranged (read: not agreed upon) so that one society could pay tribute to another or so that a military could have sovereign rule in a given area. Covenants more or less prevented collective self-reflexivity and forsworn peoples’ ability to create new forms of politics and sociality. Covenants, per their own function, have also not developed very much from their ancient roots. The foundational figures of many of the Abrahamic faiths either did not want you to be married (and thus viewed marriage as an arrangement to be mourned), did not have in mind monogamous marriage, or had very critical views of covenants.
To show that my antipathy towards religion ebbs and flows, I note that self-proclaimed secular governments and societies should not be, as Joan Wallach Scott develops in Sex and Secularism, heralded as vanguards of relational and sexual pluralism. Secular societies and areligious governments socially incentivize and fiscally reward the wedded. The pen of the Pope is all too quickly passed, with a sleight of hand, to the prince. (Or, perhaps, the prince has been passing the pen to the Pope all along.) Homosexual relationships are celebrated so long as they mirror the stable, married, and monogamous relations of heterosexual couples. If you refuse to practice stable and monogamous sex, says the verdict of Regan’s ‘80s, then you alone are responsible for your own health and guilty for your sexual practices. The supposedly ethically neutral agenda to privatize social services, as Melinda Cooper’s Family Values teaches us, found an ally in the social conservativism of people such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Be married and monogamous or do not count on the state to help you. The inevitable celebratory cries after the ‘I do’s’ become eerily strange.
David Hockney, Going to Be a Queen for Tonight, 1960 Royal College of Art, © David Hockney
Where Does the Desire Go?
When you’ve boarded your honeymoon flight and the state, church, and economy greet you with open arms, where does desire go? What happens to desire when the state now mediates your relationship, the church blesses your sex, and the economy begs for your children? Within this dystopian labyrinth of marriage there can be glimpses of desire that damn the church and are hostile towards the state, especially gay marriages, but why deceive oneself by celebrating the hegemony of marriage as anything other than Milton Friedman’s greatest achievement? Upon the recitation of vows, the possibility of a desire that is fundamentally antagonistic towards the structures that ceaselessly reproduce our hellscape of a world is foreclosed. Marriage takes desire that should be active and open to self-criticism and kills it at the altar of the state, the economy, and heteronormativity—everyone’s favorite trinity.
If loving your partner consists, in part, of desiring their freedom from both domination and arbitrary extensions of power, then jointly entering into an arrangement which can only be terminated through an application submitted to the state makes love difficult.
Of course, in the decades following the AIDS epidemic, the legalization of gay marriage was a reasonable and needed legislation. Obergefell undoubtedly gave queer people several victories: the ability be in the hospital with a sick or passing partner, to have your partner, rather than a parent, execute your estate, to have expanded healthcare access, and more. Such policies were neither conservative ventures, moments of Left betrayal, nor bourgeois opportunism on behalf of the Human Rights Campaign.
It is also true, as has been well documented, that in the years leading towards Obergefell and in near decade after it, queer movements have often cuddled up too closely with imperialism and the capitalist petrostate. There nonetheless exist practices of sexuality and love—many of which remain championed by queer theorists, writers, and organizers—that make possible, no matter how slim of a chance that possibility might be, an antagonistic relationship towards the enemies of liberation. Such practices are expressive, creative, and flexible, but they are also a polyvocal refusal to have desire be represented by the Leviathan.
Within models of nontraditional family structures, there exist the possibility of a desire that is incompatible with how capitalism reproduces itself. Expanded kinship networks, spinster siblings, blended families, and other nontraditional familial structures do not, in the very least and by no means always, bar peoples’ ability to love in such a way that does not perpetuate this world.
Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family, talks of how abolishing the nuclear family and traditional marriage models ‘expands our needs.’ Presently, the family and our wedded partners are some of our sole needs. Families are forced to act as banks, insurance agencies, protectors of social security, and incubators of care. And, needless to say, most families are either unable to adequately provide for their members and/or are Petri dishes of vicious discrimination and animosity. Developing needs that do not force people to solely need their family is of paramount importance in the effort to not let desire be petrified inside of the economy, state, and church.
Celebrating marriage, a structure that exists to reproduce this racist and oppressive world over and over again, is strange. There may be room for maneuvering in marriage in such a way that challenges this world, but the fact nonetheless remains that such maneuvers are limited; they can be an in-house critique of the state and its tricks, but it is not antagonistic to the devices of this world. People get married for a variety of reasons, and perhaps desire can be one of them, but that desire becomes the state and economy’s alibi to further this world: “See, look, there can be healthy marriages! People can be wedded as a result of love and care!” A sexuality antagonistic to the state, capital, and racism stands in the background of such echoes, knowing that this world and its obsessive relationship with marriage is but a way of death to be mourned.
Telling Your Grandmother that Marriage is a Death Cult
The brief, provocative, and theoretical musings suggested in this piece are not of the genre that can be seamlessly communicated over tea with a relative or coworker. Marriage permeates our psyches and antagonism towards it registers as a foreign language. The right to obscurity is important and valuable; one need not make themselves known to those who are infatuated with this world. Not all has to be communicable. Charity and grace need not be dispensed, but being un-understood is not an indictment upon yourself. The grammar of a desire antagonistic to the law of the land can be willfully misconstrued or arrogantly muted.
Many people do not have the choice but to marry. As someone who is chronically ill, receiving healthcare through a partner’s workplace insurance could very well be enough incentive for me to marry. And for many young people, the prospect of marriage can be anxiety inducing; I felt that marriage was a strange arrangement, but nonetheless one I would have to take part in because that is how relationships supposedly function. But let us not delude ourselves: an uncritical love invested on reproducing this world is a correlative to sadism. Knowing there exist ways of love that can fundamentally defy this world, though such defiance may seem increasingly futile, should embolden us to both find new ways to desire and to negate how marriage imprisons and exploits desire.
