FLUID GENDER/FLUID MARRIAGE
Marriage in the Euro-dominated continents is a written contract endorsed by organized religion and managed by the courts. It responds to the culture, but is forced to follow it. For instance, when people started living together and having children — even owning homes — without any formal marriage, the law had to scramble to know how to keep order among this category of people. It wasn’t easy, particularly since the males tended to drift and accumulate multiple relationships.
“A common law marriage is one in which the couple lives together for a period of time and holds themselves out to friends, family and the community as “being married,” but without ever going through a formal ceremony or getting a marriage license.”
These laws are at the state and reservation level, which complicates the matter even more because today people move so much. What was legal in one place is not in the next. Sexual preference is hardly relevant. When marriage was once based on shared genetic children, heterosexuality mattered, but there have always been adoptions, children of homosexual people (they are not sterile), and complications about child support, alimony, sharing of earned assets, and so on. The solution of many people is to simply ignore the law.
Since family based on genetics has been one of the stabilities in a nation — even in public schools — lacking them is one of the contributions to our current chaos. Cautious wealthy people — even at the local level of sharing ownership of a house or business — cannot depend on standard existing law in case of problems, so their lawyers help them frame up unique contracts to keep track. Even some people who formally marry might agree to pre-marital contracts in case of divorce.
Religion has lost its grip on record-keeping through baptism and burial as well as convincing people of the necessity of holy approval. Here in Valier the Methodist minister saw the undesirability of a specific marriage and refused to perform the ceremony without a course of counseling. It only made the family get mad and leave the church.
I myself refused to marry a couple who did not belong to the far more liberal church of my student internship. It was summer and she was wearing a sundress. Her arms and shoulders were bruised and he cheerfully admitted he had injured her. He was wearing shorts and put his feet up on his side of my desk. My supervising minister was upset by me doing this because it meant losing the money for renting the building for their ceremony.
Marriage has left both the law and religion. The solemn ceremony has been displaced by the festive party, the acknowledge of coming of age, the demonstration of wealth and power, the iconography that demands a “pretty church” to go with the gowns. The gowns themselves are sometimes more suitable for movie stars on the red carpet. The white symbolizing virginity? Forget it.
One couple — reinforced by family — got so far away from the original reasons for marrying that I offered to rent the church parish hall for a big blow-out and then — maybe even after the honeymoon — provide a small and sacred commitment to each other with few others present.
Sex and love are all confused, but definitely seen as privately entitled and defined matters. No longer is marriage a way of bonding families by extending them, as when the princesses of one nation marry the princes of another to assure international peace. As with Henry VIII, fertility can then become a world-shaking issue. It can split whole institutional religions, creating the Anglican denomination or Mormon polygamy. Currently one kind of international weddings may be American men seeking subservient women from poor countries. Things don’t always turn out well.
Ivana Trump has been married four times so far. She claims to counsel Donald privately once a week, as a kind of surrogate mom. Her husbands have been wealthy but unknown by the public. She’s a wheeler-dealer who taught Donald as well as providing a spine. Don’t worry about Melania — she’s from that same part of the world, a tough culture that is reality based. Forget church and gown — what was the value of the diamond?
How can we judge wives like Elaine Chiao and Ginny Thomas, both in long-term marriages in which they have had enormous power and wealth, probably able to covertly influence if not control the men we actually voted into office. They are putting forces in play that are not attuned to the interests of the nation.
So . . .if sex/gender is recognized as fluid, then what can fluid marriage look like? Without the Christian anchor of 19th century agricultural mores, when survival meant a man in the field and a woman in the home, can we call anything marriage? What would be the criteria? Can we possibly reach a consensus? Which marriage related laws — taxes, child custody, protection from testifying against a spouse — should be preserved? A judge can only use past precedent and future harm likelihood for the individuals involved to make decisions, but how can a judge determine harm to the culture at large? That was the delegated task of legislators before they tore themselves apart.
Our best approach to solving the problem of “marriage” is probably the same one that explores fluid gender and attachment/romance. Someone somewhere is probably writing a play something like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” What about the second incarnation of “House of Cards” after we realized the “president” was bi-? And a bit kinky. The most perceptive narratives may be the ones that explore marriages to people from different countries and circumstances.
In my own case, a young woman marrying a late midde-aged man, it was like people from two different countries marrying. Bob had far more in common with his second wife’s sister and they both enjoyed sharing music, ways of dressing, kinds of vehicles and surprising small things like how to scramble eggs and what is a proper breakfast anyway? I agreed to follow his ways until self-suppression just didn’t work anymore. By that time I didn’t share his devotion to big shots and money. I crashed.
We had married in my childhood church with me in a proper white dress (I was a virgin when I met him) and both sets of parents present as well as his daughter and grandchildren as attendants. He remarked once before he died that he “was only really married once.” All his other marriages were Cardston, Alberta, quickies where the Mormons will marry anyone, even dead relatives. I feel the same way. I never married again. We never had fantasies about spiritual heavenly involvement, but there was still residual impact and importance in the formal ceremony.
