My Wedding Was About Signing a Contract, Nothing More
This post first appeared on MOGUL on August 27, 2015.
One day, as I folded laundry, I heard myself tell my boyfriend over Skype that we would be getting married that year. I don’t know which of us was more surprised by the assertion, but we both covered well. “It just makes sense to get it over with as soon as possible,” I continued, as matter-of-factly as if I were stressing to him the importance of flossing on a daily basis.
And eight months later, I found myself in a government office wearing a purple dress signing a contract I had some very conflicting feelings about.
The truth is, I thought marriage was an outdated and inherently oppressive institution, and saw the whole wedding practice as a sickeningly vapid, puzzlingly socially acceptable way of othering those who can’t or won’t adapt themselves into a one-size-fits-all lifestyle.
I did, however, believe strongly in building a life with this man and starting a family and spending what I hope to be the majority if not the entirety of our lives as a team. I was also considering and suggesting breaking up with increasing regularity.
And so these contradictory feelings all culminated in my most rational and emotionless suggestion that we tie the knot.
We were living on separate continents at the time and neither of us had a clear indication of where we planned to end up. I felt overwhelmed with uncertainty about every aspect of my life, and knew, despite how much I loved him and wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, that I was likely to end the relationship just for the sake of stability.
If only there were some contract I could sign that would require me to stick with it when things got tough or scary.
I think the romanticization of marriage is a mistake. And I think blindly buying into it as a goal simply because it’s what we’re taught to want if we want to be normal is exactly what makes it so oppressive. So many people get so caught up in the traditions and the emotions, they fail to think critically about what marriage means to them and why they’re doing it.
Too many people get married because they’re in love and they see it as the logical next step at whatever point they’re at in their lives and in their relationship. And a lot of those marriages are successful. But it’s totally possible to be just as in love and to have just as successful a relationship without changing your civil status.
Marriage can come in a number of forms and mean a variety of things to different people. But our societal obsession with marriage as the only path to happiness glosses over the legal and practical implications, focusing instead on the party and assuming everything else will work out afterward just because you’re in love.
On the flip side are the people like me who see all the wholly valid criticisms about marriage and decide they could never partake and that the whole institution should be abolished. It’s hard to see the benefits and utility through all the taffeta and lace.
The process of getting married didn’t alleviate any of my concerns about marriage. In fact, it affirmed almost all of them. What I was surprised to discover, however, was that going through with it didn’t require ignoring or suppressing my disdain for so much of what marriage and weddings have come to be about. Signing up didn’t mean I had to turn into the institution’s number one fan. I could boil the whole thing down to exactly what it was to me: a contract.
Treating my wedding as akin to signing a lease was the only way I was able to get married, focusing more on what being married would mean for my relationship and why we were doing it than the Big Day and all the social implications.
The truth is, relationships are hard, and if there's an easy way out, sometimes you're going to want to take it. Getting married, to me, was about making being together the default, doing away with those regular assessments you have to make when you're dating, especially when it's long-distance, about how things are working and whether it might be easier to just cut your losses and call it quits. Once you're married, you no longer have to worry about whether staying in the relationship is worth it. You're in the relationship, now it's up to you to find a way to make it work. And although that might sound constraining, it's actually pretty soothing to have decided upon mutual happiness together as your primary goal and not have to worry about considering the alternatives.
Approaching my wedding day from a rational rather than emotional point-of-view, I was able to incorporate only elements that were true to our own values and objectives, doing nothing simply for the sake of tradition.
I think doing something a certain way just because that’s the way its done starts you off on a really bad foot as far as your marriage is concerned. If you’re not critical in regard to the choices you make about the wedding, how critical will you be about your martial roles going forward?
By refusing to blindly buy into a fairy tale wedding fantasy, I hoped to cut off a lot of assumptions at the root. If my wedding day didn’t have to be traditional, neither did my marriage. Regarding marriage as a contract between my husband and I allowed me to challenge some of the implied terms of that contract and make clear my objective of establishing a life and family best-suited to our own unique goals.
My life is not identical to anyone else’s, so why would marriage terms that work for others necessarily be what’s best for me? Would the hours spent discussing invitation fonts and arguing about macaroon flavours (don’t get me wrong, we did plenty of that, too) not be better spent considering naming practices and challenging assumptions about monogamy?
If a lease or employment contract contained terms you disagreed with or saw as red flags, you’d challenge them or request they be changed. So why isn’t the clause-by-clause analysis more commonly applied to marriage? Why is the take it or leave it approach accepted for what is supposed to be the most important decision you ever make? Why do those whose relationships fall outside the accepted norm have the stability and validity of their relationships challenged?
How can there possibly be a right and wrong way to contract for the intimate lives and family structure of billions of people all over the world? I don’t know how I could possibly buy into such an idea. I don’t know how anyone could.
But upon closer inspection, I was able to realize marriage didn’t have to be like that, that the institution did have some things going for it, and that I was free to take the parts that worked for me and leave the ones that didn’t.
The emotion and pomp and circumstance need to be toned way down in the equation. The decision to get married, like all important contractual decisions, requires a clear, critical, objective-oriented head and some sound independent legal advice.
