Wait, why am I getting married?

When I was young, in a small working class town in the North West of England, I used to obses-
sively collect bridal-wear inspiration. Torn from the pages of magazines, I always had the idea that
my dress would be like nobody else’s: Viktor & Rolf custom perhaps, archive Gaultier maybe, Gal-
liano for Dior? A girl can dream. Eventually, I hit puberty and very swiftly realised that I wouldn’t
be wearing a dress and I certainly wouldn’t be getting married: a gay boy, in a world where mar-
riage, for me and mine, was illegal?

Eventually, after kissing a few frogs, I met and fell in love with someone who was actively anti-
marriage. Both politically and intellectually. This completely changed my understanding of mar-
riage and what it means, so much so that I published a book about this very subject just last year. A
book where I was able to ask loads of questions: the central one being, of course, why get married?

When my partner and I got together it was still a year before gays everywhere donned white suits
and did ugly tasteless flash-mobs to Lady Gaga songs to celebrate their nuptials. And really, for us,
while gay marriage was of course a sign of turning tides from exclusion to inclusion, we felt wary.
Because when your life is spent swimming against the tide, you learn never to trust a calm sea.
Sure, inclusion might initially feel like liberation — like the kid that bullied you at school finally
sending you an apology message on Facebook — but what does it really mean? Does it just mean
becoming friends with the bully? Well… in some ways yes. And in others no.

It means your subsumption into a system that wasn’t really designed for you, and will never be de-
signed for everyone equally. And really, while everyone assumes marriage to be “equal” it’s still
pretty much impossible for a non-binary person (me) to get married using their actual pronoun,
since there’s no legal way to register anything but she or he on a birth (or marriage) certificate. The
same goes for trans men and women who haven’t been through the intensive process of changing all
their documents to match their gender. Same goes for those in other territories who aren’t able to
get married because of gender, sexuality, class, race, religion. And so marriage equality remains a
falsehood, a complete mirage.

Maybe we’ll get there. After all, the only constant in the history of marriage is change. And it al-
ways changes to include new conceptions of who is recognised as ‘marriage material’. It started
with marriage being allowed across classes, then across races, then across borders, then it didn’t
change for ages until marriage equality was passed. And while it seems like I wouldn’t care, like I
think marriage is no good thing, for many exclusion from it has had a real impact. For example, it
wasn’t until 2009 that Obama lifted a 1987 ban on HIV-positive immigrants entering the USA. Of
course, there was a waiver – if you were married. But since gay people couldn’t marry, there was no
waiver for them. In an article in Out magazine in the year 2000, it was estimated that 30,000 cou-
ples, according to the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force, were split up because the
US immigration system failed to see that gay and lesbian partnerships were valid enough to make a
case for a visa. But then one day the Whitehouse was coloured rainbow, and all of a sudden we
could cross borders together.
This is because marriage benefits the state, because the state benefits from marriage. Think about it:
coupled off, raising the next workforce (children) together, caring for each other until one of you
dies and then the children you raised care for the last one standing? And so pressure is put on us to
marry, from society, family, religion, culture because marriage is the central—and only man-made
—ritual that commits two people to caring for each other until death.

And yet, all of this said, I am getting married in a week. To the partner who once didn’t believe in
marriage. And he is marrying me — a non-binary person who will be misgendered on a national
marriage register until it is destroyed—many many years after I die—or we divorce. So why on
earth am I getting married?

There are so many reasons — I would argue the most oblique are outlined above — to say “I
don’t”. It’s costly, half of them end in divorce, it’s pretty humiliating to become some sort of atten-
tion seeking bridezilla when all you’ve done is planned a party, and, like, what’s the actual point?
Not to mention it’s seemingly a commitment to a life of monogamy, normativity, to “honour” and
“obey”?

And see I can’t wait. I really, really can’t wait. This isn’t because I believe our love to be more
unique and special that anyone else’s so it can survive that nasty divorce statistic, nor is it because I
believe that we haven’t been conditioned and pressured into the same wants and feelings as every-
one else, but it’s because it feels so thrilling to do something because you want to. Not because it’s
justifiable. Not because it’s morally good — it’s really the opposite. But because you got drunk one
night and said to each other: why do we always have to be so good? Nobody else is.

This was in January, and so we woke up hungover and engaged and wondered if we’d made the
right decision. We sat bolt upright, gasping for water. Are we?… Did we?

Initially we decided we were just drunk, but we kept coming back to it. Perhaps we just wanted a
commitment ceremony, or something to make sure we can’t leave the other with our wonderful, but
very difficult, dog. But we decided that wasn’t it. We realised we enjoyed to promise of it, the audi-
ence of it. Both as an opportunity to display our (usually quite private) love for each other, but also
to promise parts of ourselves to each other in front of people we love.

We realised that what is important about this moment in our relationship is the act of the promise it-
self. What you promise is dependent on the couple, sure. And for us, our promise to each other is to
change. It’s an active want to seek out and revel in how we change as we grow older together. It’s a
promise that forever doesn’t exist, but unhappiness does and we won’t ever do that together. It’s a
promise that we can take old, existing and archaic structures and undermine them by being in an
open relationship, by lying about my gender (which is how I’ve come to think of it) on my legal
documents, by making everyone bring food to the wedding (booze is provided). It is a promise that
love is not synonymous with control, but in fact with freedom. It’s a promise to work really hard to
take power from the active redefinition of the role of marriage and commitment in our life together.
And finally, I guess in some ways it’s about the personal being political, and vice versa. See in ev-
ery generation we arrive at a time in our life when all our friends get married, and we are happy for
them. For as long as is memorable queer people have not been allowed to do so. And so in a world
where the security of this right seems flimsy—like so many others, as we have heartbreakingly seen
over the last weeks—we have decided that now is the time to claim anything that is rightfully ours.
To seek rights and licenses before they are stripped from us. To be here, and to be present, in taking
old structures and making them new and far more beautiful than they were before.
I’ve been obsessed with marriage and weddings forever. Since I was a little girl boy I was

-injustice
-someone every second gets married
-perpetuating normativity
-false inclusion