On Marriage

It is a privilege, a great privilege, to have the choices in marriage (or not-marriage), in the state of my singularity, as it were, that I have as a middle-class, increasingly well-educated white multi-sexual woman in this country. Reading Gayatri Spivak's "If Only", her twenty-year follow-up to her article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" makes me sad that I have to acknowledge that my options constitute a privilege, although I am no less grateful for them.

The first privilege, of course, is that the state of my singularity will not determine, by and large, my safety or my economic status. Because in this country I can own property, vote, shop, earn a living, and declare myself without a partner's validation, I am not forced to make a choice between being married and being safe. For many women, that is not the case. In this country, I am better off, in purely economic terms, being single than being married to a man or woman who would inhibit my ability to earn through abuse or misuse of mutual funds. So I can decide to be single, or not, based on other considerations.

I do not need to get married if I do not fall in love, and I can get married even if I do not fall in love. I can marry for companionship, for economic stability, for fun, for increased social acceptance, for wedding gifts, for a million and one reasons. I can also leave the gay-marriage question mostly out of this post, because I live in Massachusetts, where I can marry anyone I damn well please, if I please, THANKS.

My year kicked off with a wedding. I toasted the New Year standing in a big room filled with round tables filled with place cards, wearing a floor-length satin dress that, when I stepped out of it, stood upright on its own, supported by its own infrastructure, bridesmaid to a cousin making the somewhat rash decision to marry a man she had fallen in love with less than a year prior and had only been engaged to for a few months. Since then, my other-little-brother and a high school peer have announced their engagements, and weddings have been a theme in my program; one woman got married last weekend, and my beloved N, two years younger than I am (!!!) is planning a spring wedding to her partner. I suppose with weddings invading my favorite holidays, my personal life, my history and my academic program, it makes sense that I have given them a lot more consideration this year than ever before. Disturbing, certainly, but logical. But I think this nonsense stops here. I think the wedding mania gets a year, and no more. You've had your fun, SIR. With a new year coming up in multiple senses, I think I will appreciate my singularity, and live in the singular, with not only enjoyment but purpose, and be grateful for the right and the opportunity.