A funny thing happened on the way down the aisle—a lot of gay couples are hesitating.
OK, I know I shouldn’t be raining on the marriage parade. It’s been a long, hard fight, and the recent Supreme Court decisions are something that change the landscape with respect not only to equal rights, but also equal recognition and respect for our relationships by friends, family and the credit bureaus. The thing is, the day after the decision was announced, I started hearing hushed whispers from gay men and women. As if reading from a script, they would all say the same thing: “I think it’s great that we have the right to marry. But I don’t know if I personally want to get married.”Now that we have the freedom to marry in 13 states, the District of Columbia and five Native American tribes (whew, that is a lot to say) and federal recognition, the game has changed. No longer is same-sex marriage a second-tier prospect where you have to fill out three tax returns while watching your foreign-born spouse get deported.
No longer will these once state-married but federally single couples get introduced as “My cousin Bill and his ‘friend’ Jim.”
In 13 states, the District of Columbia and five Native American tribes (again!), gay couples get to join the married-people club.
Wait a minute. Didn’t Groucho Marx once say, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member”?
Apparently he’s not alone.
After years of living together successfully, many of these marriage hesitators are asking themselves, “Do I really want to rock the boat?” Things may be moving too fast for some, and they’re getting seasick. Last I checked, marriage doesn’t come with a barf bag, so they are putting their heads between their knees until this hoopla is over.
But there’s nothing to be scared of, right? Maybe we should set these gay couples straight by looking at straight marriage with some stats from the Centers for Disease Control.
No, marriage is not a disease, but it appears to be ailing. The CDC shows us that as the population in the U.S. has steadily gone up, the marriage rate has steadily gone down—by 20 percent in just 10 years.
And, I know they say marriage is forever, but the CDC begs to differ. According to them, just over 50 percent of marriages end in divorce. Prop. 8 proponents expected this to go up even more if gays got to marry, as they thought heterosexual couples were going to jump ship. Last I checked, same-sex marriage had no effect on the divorce rate. Oh wait, I did, and it does.
States that allow same-sex marriages have a 20 percent lower divorce rate than those that don’t! Maybe the slogan should have been, “If you want to protect marriage, ban bigotry.” But I digress.
So even though things have been rough in the marriage waters, it appears adding gays to the mix is good for the overall institution. So why would some couples hesitate?
The biggest concern I hear from those who don’t want to get married right now is the worry that they will be forced to change their relationship—or worse, that it will change the course of gay culture.
If you read my previous column, you know that at least one study found that same-sex marriage had a “traditionalizing effect” on gay couples, meaning they take on more “traditional” roles in response to tying the knot. Maybe those who are afraid of losing our hard-fought cultural differences have a point.
Previously, we couldn’t have legal or societal recognition of our relationships, so we made the rules up as we went along. This is why these relationships may have worked so well. Though they didn’t have a massive support system keeping them together when times got rough, gay couples also didn’t have that same support system telling them how they “should” behave in that same relationship.
Now that our marriages are going to be viewed like everybody else’s, gay couples are going to be told how to live those relationships by traditionalists out there. If you live your relationship differently, traditional couples may see that as a threat, so the pressure will be on to conform.
But, last I checked, marriage is a legal contract that solidifies a relationship in the eyes of our society and not an obligation to move to the suburbs, have 2.3 kids and gain 30 pounds. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) Gay culture is about to go through a huge seismic shift, but then so is American culture. Rather than conforming, maybe we can use our well-known redecorating talents to spruce up the institution of marriage.
And for those who want to sit a spell and not rush in to anything, great! Marriage is not a requirement; it’s a civil right (in 13 states, the District of Columbia and five Native American tribes). The wonderful thing about being given a right is that you don’t have to exercise it. Or as my mother would say, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
So along with our freedom to marry those we love comes the freedom not to get married, too. And being able to live our relationships the way we want is truly freedom.