a long post on why i'm anti-marriage but happily getting married

When Will asked me to please marry him, it was answered with a very assured "yeah". However, it took me a long long time to get there. Although I always knew I wanted to spend my life with this guy (and indeed I do mean always, as I was enamored with him beginning at age twelve and it never really went away), I was not so sure if I wanted to marry him. I did not feel comfortable saying that out loud to anyone however, as it's not something that a girl madly in love is supposed to say. If you want to spend your life with someone, you get married. It's just the way it goes.

I don't have a commitment issue, I really don't. That's pretty clear. It's a marriage issue. It took me a long time to realize where it all came from and how to work through it. Will has made it clear he wanted to marry me---the idea never ever scared him, not even once.

And you know what? A lot of that has to do with the fact that he is a male and I am a female. I remember from a very young age feeling absolute outrage over anything I deemed to be unfair. As I grew older, that sense of needing things to be fair and right and equal manifested itself into me being a quiet but clear feminist. I remember conversations between the women in my family regarding Isabelle Allende, listening to Shawn Colvin on my tape deck incessantly, and ohhh man those arguments with my parents over not being allowed to go to parties when my brother was allowed to simply for the reason because "he was a boy and I was a girl and things happened to girls at parties". As I got older and started learning about and being interested in the women's rights movement, and of course with this the role of a female in a marriage, well I naturally became completely disgusted with the idea of changing my name and becoming one person with my husband. And males don't really have to think about those things. They are the head of the house, they don't have to change their name, they are the better, smarter sex. Right? And jesus! The rituals of weddings all only prove that fact to be true, no? Males are placed on the right side of the ceremony signifying the right hand of God. Women are given away from one male to the next. A dowry, modern day in that the bride's parents typically foot the enormous bill. Seriously. It's sick, and there's more. My best friend Justine wrote an article recently on this, if you're interested to hear more. Read here and here.

So there's all of that.

In addition to that load of a reason, there's also the 'it's-the-next-step' fact that annoyed me into not wanting to get married.

At about two years into our relationship, regardless of being super young and still in college, people started asking us when we were going to get engaged. The longer we stayed together, the more questions we got. It was OBNOXIOUS. First, how is that your business? But second...why? Why does that matter so much to people? Just because you are with someone for a long time does not mean you need to get married, ever! What does marriage even mean? You don't just get married because that's what comes next. Graduate high school. Go to college. Graduate college. Get married. Have babies. It's the rule. You must follow the rule. But why?

So why am I getting married, after all of that? What made me okay with this? A lot of reflection, sure. But it's more.

The thing is, I was with someone that was (is!) incredible. He gets it. He is a feminist himself, or rather I think even moreso a humanist, but you get the point. Our getting married wouldn't ever change that. There is a freedom that comes with being with someone that wants fairness in the roles of gender within a relationship (slash the world) just as much as you do. What's so scary about getting married then? And so when he asked me to please, please just marry him, I just knew. I wanted to marry him. And so I said yeah and we were just like that, getting married.

So I suppose it's not really that I'm anti-marriage. It's more that I'm anti-traditional-marriage-just-because-thats-what-you're-supposed-to-do. If you're 23 and graduated college and with a longterm partner, don't get married just because you're supposed to. Think about it. If you want to do it, do it. But just think about it. I feel the same about a traditional wedding ceremony. If you are choosing to get married in a traditional ceremony, then really choose it. Think about it. Question it. If it's what you want, do it. Want to change your name? That's wonderful! But don't just do it because you're supposed to. I'm not here to judge that, and I don't. It's just that with my own battle with being anti-marriage for so long but now wanting to get married, I learned that marriage isn't so scary when you are able to come to the realization that a marriage is yours, and it's what you make it. It seems like the most obvious of realizations, but it took me awhile to get there.