Save The Date: The Institution vs The Commitment (Part Two)
This article was originally published on June 23, 2023 on my Medium page.
I decided to make this a two-part series because I also wanted to share my thoughts on the subject matter as the creator of the questionnaire. I wanted to create a complementary piece that rounded out the discussion on the topic, so this piece will be more personal in discussing my thoughts and feelings about marriage, the institution vs the commitment.
I’m a Black queer working-class NC native living and working in the DMV area. Marriage was not a fantasy I obsessed over in my childhood and not something I’ve been preparing for in my adult life, at least consciously anyway. I was raised in a legally unmarried two-parent household, and they have been together for about 27 years now. We can argue whether or not their relationship constitutes a type of marriage, especially within the context of Dr. Tera Hunter’s definition of marriage in Bound in Wedlock, a historical unpacking of Black marriage in the 19th century. She writes, “In this book, I define marriage as it was understood during and after slavery to encompass committed conjugal relationships, whether legal or not, monogamous, bigamous, polygamous, or serial” (pg. 7). So perhaps my parents are informally married to each other. I’ve discussed the reasons that the notion of my parents not being legally married wasn’t an issue for me particularly in light of what I would consider a rather dysfunctional relationship. I imagine my parents may have had dreams to get legally married but that was never a real priority for them because poverty takes up space in how we engage in decision-making regarding our relationships. It’s also not lost on me that the people that I do know that are married or getting married are generally more financially well-off than the unmarried folks I know. I currently have a college friend getting married this year as I’m one of the bridesmaids so weddings don’t make me break out in hives. I have some extended family members and a few close friends that have been married and fewer that have been divorced. Thus, while my immediate and extended families haven’t signed those papers en masse, I just so happen to be in community with people who have a completely different familial background regarding their investment in marriage.
When I visually think of marriage, I usually picture the wedding. The presentation of a martial union in front of the Lord, family members, and friends. There was a time as a child when I wanted to be a flower girl but beyond that, I don’t remember having any big dreams for a wedding. (Also, who is paying and with what money are we paying for a wedding?) I think about how beautiful and rather expensive these weddings are. Weddings to me feel like the fantasy of relationships being actualized in real time. All of the adoration and celebration of the beginning of a new or newer experience with people of their choosing in the company of their loved ones. So many possibilities for how this love can be felt and experienced! Of course, not all that glitters is gold and at some point you reach a level past new and have to contend with the reality of relationships. I think about how people put more emphasis on the wedding while the marriage falls flat. It’s no shocker to me that people who spend tons of money on their weddings tend to have shorter marriages than people who don’t spend as much, controlling for other factors. I think about the bright smiles and sometimes drama that unfolds even at those events. Marriage to me is the reality and day-to-day of relationships while the wedding is the fantasy of what could be. I think about how marriage is considered the championship for women’s lives as if to imply that being married (to cis men) sets you up for life. I think about the connections between eugenics and marriage. I think about status and wealth and the societal expectation to keep up appearances at the expense of true happiness and fulfillment. I also think about the legal, financial, and emotional implications of such unions. Divorce to me is the dissolving of a marital union. The expensive breakup. I think about how people who don’t want to leave have an opportunity to extract and delay the inevitable. I think about how ridiculous it is to have a grace period before a divorce can be legally requested. I also think about my aunt that throws divorce parties and I think about the grief but also the joy that accompanies separation sometimes. All death isn’t fatal and sometimes celebration is in order.
To be clear, I like to create a distinction between marriage and the institution of marriage. Marriage as a concept to me is commitment. To say, I am willing to contribute to your well-being by caring for you and allowing you to care for me long-term, however long-term is defined or experienced for folks. A merger between communities through the union of separate individuals. (I don’t believe in “til death do us part” in a traditional sense because if I’m miserable, I’m leaving.) The institution of marriage speaks to the privileges legal marital unions receive over alternative forms of relationship building. It’s connected to tax benefits and marriage laws that are heavily informed by white supremacy, eugenics, misogynoir, patriarchy, religion, capitalism, etc. It’s about state intervention in one’s personal affairs. I’m personally highly critical of the institution of marriage because I truly feel like Black love can transcend legal documentation and contracts. Saidiya Hartman’s quote on property, marriage, and love in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments for Black people gets at the heart of what I want to preserve when talking about marriage. She writes:
As items of cargo, they had experienced first-hand the ugliness and violence of the world as seen through the ledger and double-entry bookkeeping. They had endured the life of the commodity. They had been propagated and harvested like any other crop, treated no differently from the tools and the animals owned by massa. They knew a corporation was not a person, not flesh and blood, and that a piece of paper secured nothing that a white man was bound to respect; they knew starvation wages weren’t freedom, but another kind of slavery. The things they valued most had no price on them. (pg. 319)
I don’t think that the act of publicly declaring long-term love, in general, is a problem. I think the state’s involvement in it is. The institution allows for romantic relational hierarchies that are not useful for community building. Additionally, part of marriage is the expectation that your children “belong” to the cis man that you married so even the children suffer. Union vs Confederate debates on legalizing black marriage after the Civil War lead to a two-tiered system of emancipation that made the freedom of slave black wives contingent upon their husband’s freedom. (The framing of those rights is modeled after the man, woman, and child framework embedded in Christianity.) I also think about Black women needing to be married to Black men to access freedom in juxtaposition to Black women going to prison over marital promises that didn’t materialize. In a review of Bound in Wedlock, Thomas McClung writes, “Following emancipation, marriage was encouraged, and sometimes required by both society and the government, and desirable for blacks as a means of expressing their worthiness of citizenship and being considered fully equal in spite of their previous status.” What does it mean when your assumed access to freedom is just an illusion to cover up another type of bondage? I don’t think it’s necessary to keep hope alive for the institution when it comes to how the state has dictated who does and doesn’t have what would be considered “proper or respectable lives”. I just feel like the state does nothing but add even more pressure to possible situations that are already boiling over or close to it. But if we take the pot off of the stove, maybe there can be opportunities to be clearer about our wants, needs, and desires relative to community building, and personal relationships. To customize them in ways that work best for our people and ourselves without having to fit our desires into the box of the institution of marriage. Like I’ve stated before, I don’t have an issue with ppl declaring their commitment and devotion to one another for a long time. I think it’s beautiful. What I don’t like is the state’s involvement in people’s personal and intimate relationships.
I also don’t like how we also perpetuate an otherwise arbitrary divide between unmarried and married persons that reinforces hierarchies and respectability politics. Ultimately, we never really know all of the details of each other’s relationships and sometimes that lack of knowledge lends itself to allowing abuse and neglect to slide to “look” like you have it together. I find that to be the main priority of people who place these types of arbitrary hierarchies on married relations over unmarried ones. I feel like it’s just so much more productive to build on relationship-based skills rather than aesthetics or just the fantastical elements of romance. You don’t have to be married to have a legit relationship with your loved ones. Some of the research I found on Black marriage talks about how Black people were able to legally “legitimize” their marriages during the Civil War so it makes sense as to why folks may believe that Black love is best legitimized through suffering rather than care and companionship. I also think that adjusting or readjusting the level of respect that you have for a person’s relationship based on them being married or not is weird. I think we can all do better in not projecting our personal measures of relational success onto other people’s relationships. Just honor the truth of them and support the people that you love.
Storytime: I remember when I was in elementary school I had a crush on this boy (my straight days were interesting) and I wrote a thing that I was going to give to him but I think I chickened out and kept it in my pocket. I forgot to take it out before my mom did laundry, so she found it and confronted me about it after she had read it apparently. She told me that she was going to tell my father so that he could talk to me about it. That talk came not too long after that as a punishment for something else I did. The main thing I remember from that conversation was “books over boys”. (The more I think about this, it’s not horrible advice given that I have to navigate patriarchy but I digress.) Given the “books over boys” speech I honestly feel like I subconsciously latched on to the idea that the two cannot coexist, the idea that perhaps you can’t have it all. I’ve always felt like I have to be in a certain position in my life to make room for romantic connections, which is also something I’ve never experienced before either. With my friends, it’s not like that. I’ve made friends without necessarily trying to because I just so happened to be in the same spaces consistently or maybe we shared space and got close through consistent proximity. I’ve also come to establish community and have accomplished a decent amount in my almost 26 years of life without feeling like I needed romantic relationships to do so. And also, I think it’s interesting that the “books over boys” lesson wasn’t intended to encourage balance but to incentivize choosing the best option for what seems like a fixed sense of direction. (People can evolve and change at any point if they want to.) So as you can see, my fantasies in life were not tied up in frilly dreams of weddings and marriage where I’m the ultimate wife. I dreamed about life outside of my home. I was telling a friend recently that my baseline daydreams mostly consisted of me fighting people (bullying at school) and running away to Hawaii (emotional neglect in the home). I dreamed about what college life could be like. I thought about being a tennis player once literally because of Serena Williams. I thought about being an architect once. I thought I was going to be in the military for 8 years (gags), be a civilian accountant when I left the military, and become a musician once I hit my 30s. (I created that plan at 10 years old and yes, I am a Virgo Sun and Mercury.) The pursuit of romantic relationships and the dream of marriage weren’t that strong for me in my younger years. However, I definitely watch Say Yes to the Dress on TLC when it’s on. I definitely have seen Four Weddings. I’m a soon-to-be two-time bridesmaid at the end of this year. I won’t be disingenuous in saying that I’ve never EVER thought about it, but I can say for certain that my dreams for my life and career had more potency in my life since high school than the concept of being married and having a fantastical romantic love life. My dad’s dream for me was to get a job with PTO, good benefits, vacation time, and weekends off. I think my mom wanted me to do what made me happy. Even my parent’s dreams for me didn’t consider marriage so I just naturally played the “good girl” role. The good girl placed books over boys. Being the creator of my own marital imaginations is not a skill I’m well-versed in.
Beyond that, the complexities of being Black, poor, and Southern in the U.S. amplifies dysfunction within the house. I was never really pressed about my parents not being legally married because I secretly wanted my parents to break up for various reasons. I’ve always felt like if they split up and found their own sense of self and happiness separately, it would have drastically improved the familial relationship as a whole. I still feel that way. I guess I also think about marriage through the lens of how safe and feasible it is for one to leave the experience once they decide it’s not for them. I think that I’ve witnessed these relationship experiences from the perspective of when people should part ways and not necessarily about dreaming up the beginning and the maturing of a new and enduring romantic love. It’s giving death doula. What’s interesting though is that my desires for deeper romantic connections have been very loud for me over the last few years and I still have no clue as to what I want. In a lot of ways I guess I’m still underdeveloped in drawing up the blueprints for something new. I know when things should end and I’m confident in my ability to support sustainability but I’m not very practiced at setting the proper tone for how it should begin. One of the struggles I’ve been having in writing this piece is reckoning with the amount of shame I have for these romantic desires because it feels like a major deviation from who I’ve built myself to be over the last 25 (almost 26) years of my life. To dream of something I’ve never even experienced feels out of the realm of possibility. When I dream of things or create goals for myself, I tend to not shoot for anything that feels completely delusional or outlandish and that is what romance has been for me. It hasn’t been anything I wanted or desired to pursue until the last few years to be completely honest so what I conjure up in my imagination for this piece will likely be tweaked.
In terms of what I feel like I would want for myself, I know for sure that I’m capable of maintaining multiple coexisting friendships decent enough and that I honestly only have space for one romantic partner at a time. I would prefer to either not get married legally and have a long-term “special friend”, have a wedding that focused on me and my partner but not sign off on the marriage license, or have a wedding with me and my niggas as a communal commitment to one another. I find the phrase “special friend” as a better interpretation of how I would want a romantic partner to fit in my life. It’s a little morbid because that’s definitely how they refer to unmarried folks in obituaries but I personally find the term endearing. I am someone who really cares deeply for my friends while, for much of my life, my sexual endeavors have operated on the fringes of my private sphere. Meaning that we keep our friends close and these niggas at a distance. Books over boys. A potential romantic partner for me, at this moment in time, would have to be someone that has the qualities of a profound, sincere, kind, and politically aligned friend with a sprinkle of romance and sex. Even still romance isn’t something that I’ve quite figured out nor has it been anything I’ve experienced so even invoking the experience of something I don’t fully understand also feels nonsensical. But then I picture myself with a partner whom I love dearly with all of my community members surrounding us while we give heartfelt vows. (Jumping the broom without signing the papers so that if divorce is in order, we can settle it outside of the state.) I see myself in a white jumpsuit rather than a wedding dress. I love weddings and receptions by the water based on the ceremonies I’ve seen on TV and would prefer mine to be non-religious. I wouldn’t want a big wedding, especially in this pandemic and economy. All the other logistical details are a blur. I’ve dreamed of traveling with a partner and sharing deeply intimate moments that don’t just involve sex. I also think that while I’ve placed romance much lower on the priority list in praxis, it still takes up so much space in my mind and it’s honestly hard to reconcile those feelings and thoughts. I have a safe place to be, to feel, and to grow and yet I still feel like something is missing which is also something I’ve been trying to resist all my life to not replicate the fuck shit I see more often than not in the world. My imaginations, dreams, and fantasies around what a more romantic dynamic would be for me are blurry and it’ll just have to do for now until I feel I can lean fully into it without a ton of shame. We’ll see.
