Marriage Project, Day 14

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Jill

This is the first story to mention the fact that being married feels different. It does. That’s the privilege, the feeling of being married, the thing we’ll never capture in civil unions and domestic partnerships. What’s being denied us is a status that other couples are allowed to enjoy as though they’d earned it. You don’t earn privilege, but you can certainly withhold it. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

I believe, that as human beings, we are innately sacred and that love is our divine gift. I believe in the sanctity of marriage, as it is defined by the individuals involved, the union is sacred. Through the ritual of marriage, whatever that ritual is, we are making the ultimate gift of our love. In marriage we bind our lives together through a sacred promise with our partner to strengthen each other with our love, to honor our love, protect it, cultivate it, and to build our lives on its foundation. When we share this ritual with our friends and family we are there to share our joy, celebrate our love and declare that we are dedicated to one another and committed to our union. There is power in this declaration. We find added strength in our community through the acknowledgment and respect they give our union and their support of our love.

To those who say marriage is the foundation of our society, that marriage strengthens our society: I ask what is the foundation of marriage? While I think a huge part of marriage is commitment, ultimately, love is the foundation of marriage.  It really is all about the love. Love strengthens and unifies us therefore marriage strengthens and unifies us, and it does, until churches and politicians decide to put exclusionary limitations on the marriages of consenting adults. The argument over marriage equality is only dividing us as a nation; it separates us as citizens, and breeds hate among us. It shouldn’t be an argument at all. We have an inalienable right as human beings to love whomever we love and to express that love through marriage: it is vital to our pursuit of happiness; it is integral to who we are.

I believe in religious freedom as a right in this country. If a person’s religion defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman, they have a right to believe that, and practice that right in their own church, in their church community. They do not have the right to force the rest of society to conform to their interpretation and they have a responsibility to not allow that belief to spread bigotry and hate. I have the right to question the sanity and validity of such a belief and to not adhere to that church’s laws.

Our government has absolutely no right to adopt this religious belief as the basis for their definition of marriage.  The definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman excludes not only our LGBT community but any person practicing a religion that doesn’t agree with this narrow definition. It infringes on our freedoms, undermines our individual liberty and muddles the line between church and state. The government’s role in marriage should have nothing to do with defining it, only protecting it and the parties involved. Marriage laws that were initially designed to protect our children, our rights and our property have been twisted into laws that pardon discrimination. Laws that promote and defend bigotry. Where is the love?

My husband and I have been married for fourteen years. Before we married we lived together for three and a half years. Other than finally having access to the full legal benefits of a military spouse I didn’t really expect much to change when we married, but it did. The shift is difficult to fully describe, you just feel it. It’s subtle and strong and reassuring. Pure joy in the possibilities of a life together. It’s a feeling everyone should be free to experience; it’s something to be shared by all of us. We must allow the love, the commitment to that love to spread. To allow it to live and breathe and grow, in the open, unrestrained.  It’s all about love. How is that not beneficial to us all?

Shannon Schwehr Korrell
Fort Worth, TX

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Vagina vagina vagina

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Jill

You’re on a bed, and you’re thinking about rope. It’s a pathway. It’s a story that delivers you. You can track it, the way you were tethered to shame. The time in the van, with the burn against your face, against your wrists. You tore and bruised and cut your skin. You let it be whipped and pummeled. You kept waiting for something to break. The seat? Was it? The place where your soul sat? Your conscience? What lived in the place you wanted broken?

There would be a voice sometimes, after, a voice that said something so faint you never could hear it. A voice you were too tired to chase.

She pressed her knee into my ribs and pinned me.

He held my throat and told me never to use my hands. A terrible price when I forgot.

There is nothing here. Nothing. My only deep place. I said that and believed it. A child afraid of caves. Bandits hide in them. Treasure. Eden. A garden. I always loved Eve. Always. The snake and the apple. To be the first to bite into it. It’s only a story. The first taste.

My mouth was bleeding and I’d fallen. The mud kept trying to keep my boots. On the other side of her there was a bridge, and then a bar, and then music. I could hear it in the field. They blame Eve for everything. And they are so right. She made this possible. She made pleasure possible.

I wanted to break my shame. I see that now. I wanted to batter it to pieces, and vomit those pieces into the sea. I’ll eat until I’m full, then rest and eat again. I’ll live with joy, and you can call it sin. You who are ashamed of your nakedness. You who are afraid of hunger. The tree was there for her to find. She only had to be brave enough to reach out. Brave enough to pick one. Brave enough to bite.

 

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Marriage Project, Day 13

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Jill

I love this description of sexuality. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

One night, about two years ago, I went out to the bar with a couple of friends. We met a couple of guys and ended up hanging out with them for a while, sharing beers and cracking jokes. I was having my birthday party the next weekend, and invited them, half joking. Before they left for the evening, one of the guys asked for my number so that he could call for directions to my party later. My friends and I left to go dancing at a different bar, where I met a lady. She and I danced and kissed for an hour or so, and I invited her to my party and gave her my number too. I really wanted her to call me, but she didn’t. Instead, the guy called me a week after we met, took me out for Ethiopian food, and we sat by the river in the sun and talked about quantum physics. I began to fall in love then and there.

Sexuality isn’t this thing that is chiseled into our DNA, that we are forced to follow because our genes tell us so. For me, it is like a river, bending this way and that. I am attracted to people, not genders. There are times that I am infatuated with a woman and want to be with her in all ways, and others that I am equally as infatuated with a man, but it is because of who, not what, they are. It also rises and falls and there are times that I feel like a wild, ravenous being and others that my sexuality is barely a trickle and I feel like I could go for years without being touched. I am at peace with this part of myself.

I am not an exciting person by any means. In fact, when you boil it down, we are all pretty damn boring. I have formulaic ways that I respond to certain things — I curl up like a caterpillar in my sheets and cover my head when I want to ignore my partner; I get mad about the dishes not being washed; I pretend to brush my teeth so that I can watch myself cry in the mirror. Having found someone who can laugh at me, with me, and also take me seriously when I need it has been fulfilling, frustrating, and satisfying.

What if instead of finding him, I had found her? What if we had fallen in love, and like my partner now, we were planning on getting married? What if we were our most boring selves together? There would have to be some kind of “coming out” to my family; my friends would have to learn to take my relationship seriously; I would have to endure weird sex questions from people; my wedding might be considered to be pretend because it would not be legal, and this is just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head at this moment. It sounds exhausting. A few of my couple friends, who happen to be gay, have the most loving and stable relationships of anyone I know. I think that it is partly because they had to endure a barrage of ridiculousness, and if you can bear that together, then by God, you can deal with anything.

In our nation’s very recent history, a black person could not legally marry a white person. I told this to my oldest daughter and she responded with absolute horror. The idea of two people not being allowed to marry based on the color of their skin seems preposterous and barbaric to most of us now, and even a child can see how insane it is. This is not to say that racism does not persist, and that interracial couples are widely accepted because they aren’t. They are, however, legally allowed to join to each other for as long as they see fit and no one can argue with that. One day in the not too distant future, parents will tell their children that people used to be unable to marry because of their gender, and their children will respond with disbelief. A child knows that we all have the right to love, that we should be allowed to burn for whomever we want to without shame. It is your right to be boring with whomever you choose, for as long as you are both right for each other.

Marriage equality is not only important, but essential for our society to move forward. Equality is not something that you should have to ask, beg, and plead for. The fear of not being accepted should not be like a lead sweater you put on every morning, that try as you might, you just can’t seem to get used to. Marriage equality is not going to make everyone accept love in all of its forms overnight, but it is a promise that it is going to get better and that makes my heart sing.

Whitney Jacques
Spokane, WA

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Lovesick

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Jill

I’ve been listening to Jack White’s Love Interruption nonstop. I’ve been thinking of the way we convince ourselves, in our youth, that love is this fire that torches rooms. That takes out cities. Love kicked my ass and threw me across the Pacific. Love left me sobbing in the bathtub of a stranger’s house. Love led me into an alleyway in Venice and let me witness a miracle.

There was a time when I thought only artists would ever understand me, and I was filled with despair.

Youth is wasted on the young is one of those stupid expressions you resent when you’re a kid, but I’m not a kid now. They’re talking about vigor, of course. Why can’t we keep all the vigor of our youth as we become less destructive? As we learn to love without casualties. Wait, is that what we learn? To love without casualties? No, there’s always injury. There’s always the gap between what we said and what we meant. I guess I’m talking about pyrotechnics. About tantrums. We’re supposed to outgrow them.

The truth is, we learn stillness. We learn that if you don’t know what to do, you shouldn’t do anything. Because action isn’t the same thing as progress. Sometimes it’s just flailing. We learn that snarky one-liners don’t make you a genius, they just make you more willing to be hurtful.

When two poets walk up to each other at a party, and one bites the other’s face hard enough to draw blood, we no longer think, Fuck. That’s romantic. We think, That’s not OK. That’s no way to greet somebody.

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Marriage Project, Day 12

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Jill

You don’t have to believe in marriage to believe in equality. That’s what equality is: the opportunity to choose. You can sneak same into that sentence if it pleases you, but for me opportunity is a big enough word. There’s room for all of us. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

They say every little girl dreams of her wedding day, but I was never a very good little girl. Perhaps it was my feminist mother’s insistence that I remain independent at all times, perhaps it’s the fact that between the two of them my parents have nine marriages in all. Either way, I never dreamed of getting married. I dreamed of motherhood, a good education and one day owning my home.

All these seemed like goals to work toward whereas marriage always seemed like nothing more than a good idea, a nice suggestion. I like the idea of finding that one person in your life who will always be there. I like the idea of building a history with someone, but finding that relationship seems like magic to me, a lightning strike maybe to someone lucky enough to be standing in the right spot.

I look at my friends who have been struck, who have found that magical relationship and committed to it. Two women who have been together going on 30 years, who have raised children together and stuck together through the decades, or two new fathers who after decades of just the two of them have taken that next step and adopted a child. They have achieved an amazing amount of history to me. It’s quite an accomplishment.

Despite my early insistence as a young girl that I was never going to get married, I did once get engaged. We had the culturally approved mismatched genitalia, but we were also horribly unsuited for each other. If I had followed through with the marriage our mistake would have been legally sanctioned and it would have ended shortly after, I’m sure.

I’m not sure what makes a marriage last, but I know people who have failed at it and people who have thrived in it. I want everyone to have the legal right to try, cause you never know who’s going to get it right. And when two people do get it right it’s completely awe-inspiring. It gives even a cynic like me hope that maybe I too could try.

Frankie Ortega
Houston, TX

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Marriage Project, Day 11

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Jill

We had five infant boys at our wedding, and one of my favorite photos is of Heather and our friend, L., who is visibly pregnant with her daughter. They are both looking at Heather’s newborn with perfect adoration. These two gorgeous ladies, who can’t look away from this gorgeous child. That photo captures the point of weddings for me. Love and community. Simple. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

Marriage is the baring of a couple’s united soul in front of their friends, family and loved ones. Back in the day, I used to declare I would never get married and never have kids. I didn’t believe either was something that would work for me. We all know how well I stuck to that.

I’ve heard those who are against the choice of two consenting adults to marry unless it is defined in some tattered old book written at a time when women, and people, were property. It’s unpleasant, to say the least, because they pick and choose their morality. This coupled with the splattering of media hype of such folks as the Kardashians, etc., I am sorry … but I don’t think two women or men pledging their love threatens the sanctity of marriage. I think what threatens the sanctity of marriage is those who don’t treat it with its due love and respect..and those qualities are not gender-specific.

I’ve heard people insult the gay community, claiming them to be frivolous and promiscuous. Yet when the gay community asks to be married, they are denied. So they can’t get married, so they must be frivolous and promiscuous. I call bullshit on this. It’s a vicious cycle with no exit sign. At least, until recently. (Thank you Washington!)
I cried many tears at my friends’ wedding, not because of my recent childbirth, but because my heart was raw in feeling the depth of their love and devotion to each other. “Will you feed me ice chips on my death bed?” still haunts me to this day. They are an extraordinarily beautiful couple, and I would defend their right to love each other as staunchly as my right to love my husband. There is an ease, and a natural beauty to their relationship with which I cannot imagine anyone could find fault. And I know there are so many couples out there, waiting with bated breath for the law to recognize their love as legal. Sad part is, they shouldn’t have to wait.

I look forward to a day when the concern is what it is in our hearts, and not so much what is between our legs, or what some feels offends their religious agenda. These same couples that those types feel shouldn’t be allowed to marry also work, pay taxes, many have children, and are very much contributing members of society … so to hold back their right to marry is dehumanizing.

Love is love, no matter whose body it possesses, and it’s time to love, and let love.

Heather Youngs
Spokane, WA

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Marriage Project, Day 10

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Jill

I love the idea of boys planning their weddings. Much is made of equality being the destruction of marriage. In fact, it’s a reinvigoration of a concept straight people are so tired of they’ve memorialized the reluctant groom in every medium (those cake toppers with the bride dragging the groom to the altar are just embarrassing). Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

Ever since I can remember, I have wanted a family of my own.  To be married, to have children, to grow old with the person I love. When I was young, my thoughts were very conventional, a wife, 2 children, picket fence, etc. At 18, I married my high school sweetheart and 5 months later, our son was born. My ‘perfect’ life evolved to what I had always hoped for … or so it seemed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my wife very much, but something was just not ‘perfect’ about our life. Twelve years later we divorced. The reasons don’t matter now, but this new-found freedom of mine opened my eyes. I could be me … the me I had always known.

The years have flown by and I have always wanted to get married again.  One problem with that … gay marriage just hasn’t been a reality. Sure, we have had domestic partnerships and civil unions, but marriage? No, not yet. I’m sorry, but how do you say ‘Will you civil union me?’ or ‘Hey, how about a domestic partnership?’ … no, you say ‘Will You Marry Me?’  I have wanted to say that, for as long as I can remember, to the person I love.

After a few failed relationships, I reconnected with a man I once promised to meet. We connected, we fell in love and through the hurdles we have decided to share a life together. This man, I want to marry. Last Sunday, February 12th, I asked him to marry me. He said yes and I put a ring on his finger. We hope that by the time we actually have our ceremony that it will be legal in Washington State.

Grant
Spokane, WA

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Marriage Project, Day 9

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Jill

One of my favorite things about this project is hearing how much people want to celebrate joy. We want to. It’s deep in us, the press toward joy. This post is filled with love. You can feel it as you read. She’s like this in real life, too. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

Marriage … isn’t important to me. The idea of marriage, the equality of it, and access to it, however, is.

I, personally, believe in no forever, no unconditional love, no fairytale. I believe that there is a higher chance of obligation becoming the reason my marriage would continue, not unyielding affection. To me, and again I say, TO ME, a piece of paper with a state-sanctioned promise is completely meaningless.

However, I also believe denying anyone their own piece of paper with a state-sanctioned promise and all the rights and perks that come along with it is abhorrent.

Marriage is beautiful, inspiring, and necessary. I truly believe that. I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the most awe-inspiring, thought-provoking wedding I have ever seen last year. There was no church, no priest, no tux, no marriage license, and no groom. There was, however, the most awesome; and I mean awesome to its most literal definition; out pouring of love throughout the entirety of the night. Not just from the brides, mind you, but from the whole group that came to support them in their decision.

During the service, one of the women in the marriage party said something to the extent of:

Marriage is a promise not only to and for each other, but also to and from the couple’s community. That the couple would share their love and joy and hardships with their chosen community and not hide it from the world, but also that their community promised to celebrate with as well as support the couple.

It was everything I had ever believed from the possibility of marriage. To my life, no, marriage is not important, but I do believe that in and of itself sums up the entire debate of marriage equality. I don’t need or want a marriage, so I chose not to get married.

I would never deny that right to any couple based on something as insignificant as what genitals they happen to possess. It is my commitment in life to celebrate joy wherever it springs up, so this hedonist heart will be at every wedding her community has to offer and can do nothing but smile blissfully at the idea of all the women and men who can finally marry whomever they choose.

Amora Lenzi
Spokane, WA

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The mess of mourning

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Jill

I have been thinking about the mess we make of things by mourning them. The way we give them so much credit. The way we tighten their seams, and brighten their paint. My, you glowed then, didn’t you? For a time. They used to say the province of women was grief. It was assigned to us, like mothering. Another thing to tend to.

And grief requires tending, doesn’t it? It requires some attention. Maybe we cannot live in this world without grief. Everything has another side. The other half of joy, what is it? Is it grief? We celebrate for balance. Is that right? We celebrate so that we will not be overcome.

I don’t think so. I think our joy is not the other half, but the place inside grief. The heart of it. The center. I think that’s how grief begins to fall away. How it wears to us lightly, lightly. I have been trying to name the things I grieve, and somehow the words won’t form. I can’t see them. I can’t say them. And I don’t feel responsible for them. Not anymore.

Now that I am Never Alone
-Tess Gallagher

In the bath I look up and see the brown moth
pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips
against the white wall. I heat up
the water, running as much hot in as I can stand.
These handfuls over my shoulder—how once
he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped
a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring
we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief
that stills a moment so I can never look
back. Only now, brightest now, and the water
never hot enough to drive that shiver out.

But I remember solitude—no other
presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw
fluttering I make of you as you have made of me
your watch-fire, your killing light.

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Marriage Project, Day 8

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Jill

My pen pal is an American in Denmark. She sent this story hours after Mary and I argued about Dan Savage’s decades-old assertion that marriage might be the beginning of the end of gay culture. Now I have even more to think about. Meet my guest for today’s Marriage Project:

To be perfectly honest, I have never wanted to get married. But I’ll tell you that I have also felt a little guilty about that. Because, in just the way that heterosexual couples are “privileged,” my partner and I have been, too.

Two and a half years ago, we moved to Denmark, perhaps the most tolerant country in the world. While they’ve been a little slow getting around to full marriage rights (legislation that will pass this year), Denmark was the first to recognize same-sex civil unions. In 1989. Government-sanctioned gay relationships in Denmark are as old as the average nightclub patron. And in most ways, far more normal.

When we first moved here, people back home would ask what the gay community was like. Surely it was thriving and exciting! It’s been hard explaining to my gay friends – who consider Copenhagen in much the same way that pot smokers think of Amsterdam – that there really isn’t one. There’s a pride parade and the GLBT Film Festival, but everyone goes to these. Everyone. Grandmothers and small children go, and politicians and police officers, military in uniform – not to protest or keep the peace, but just for something fun to do on a summer afternoon.

The Danes are beyond tolerant. Their value system is based on opportunity and equality. Same-sex couples can adopt easily, and the government partially subsidizes fertility treatments and IVF – lesbian or otherwise. In fact, my visa and work permit actually hinge on my girlfriend’s, under what’s known as “Family Reunification.” On all of our paperwork, I get to check the box that says “Cohabitating Partner.” Not married, no. But still my love is valid. My love has an equal weight.

At the end of this summer, our privilege ends. We will be coming home – to our real home. To family, and the familiar, all of the million things we love and have missed. And if we were to have married, Florida would not recognize it.

While living abroad, I have occasionally found myself being an apologist. I’ve tried to explain why my country can’t care for its sick or poor, or its children – not in the way that Scandinavia can. But this isn’t even that complicated. It’s not a matter of tax laws or logistics; this is simple bigotry.

So coming home means being relegated to a place I haven’t thought about in a while. In a state that only very recently lifted a ban on gay adoption. (Not for gay couples, mind you. Gay people, period.) Our powers value neither equality nor opportunity, and I feel unsafe again. Like I have something very basic and tender to hide.

The fact is, I may not want to be married, but it’s devastating to lose the right.

Shelly Wilson
Copenhagen, Denmark

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