A Modest Proposal for Marriage

This is based on a comment of mine at a comment of mine at LoOG:

I’m one of two 26-year olds I know who has any children. I have two beautiful little girls with the same woman, and we’re unmarried. The reason we’re unmarried is not because we’re uncommited to each other. It is simply because we find the very concept of marriage to be absurd as it relates to our unique situation as members of two diferent cultures.

If one’s definition of marriage is a mechanism to preserve wealth from one generation to the next or a mechanism to control against the inevitable spread of disease through polygamy and adultery, these definitions are anachronistic and insulting.

If one sees marriage as a primarily religious creation, my “wife” and I are not religious. She is from a Japanese Buddhist family, and I am from an American Catholic family. Were we to have a wedding, where would it be? How would we do it? Would I insist that my family come to Japan for the ceremony? Would my “wife” insist that her family travel to America? Would the Catholic Church refuse to marry us? Would my “wife”‘s grandmother flip out because the Catholic priest didn’t offer rice to the gods before the ceremony?

What are our options then? Should we head to Vegas for an Elvis wedding? Should we go to the City Hall and solicit the permission of some public servant to marry and have children? (Oops, too late.) After the ceremony will he say, oh, by the way, have you paid your taxes yet for this year? I’m sorry, we’re going to need three forms of official identification. Your driver’s license is out of date. Please fill out this form and bring it to the sixth floor for processing. We’ll need a revenue stamp and letters-of-consent from each of you. Did you get tested for syphillis yet? Not exactly romantic. And not exactly natural and free either. And kind of insulting.

Our only remaining option then is to have some kind of tacky secular ceremony. Everyone boogieing down to the Chicken Dance, Dancing Queen, and C&C Music Factory in some overpriced KofC somewhere is not exactly a moment to be treasured. And in Japan, where white foreigners are employed on a part-time basis as “priests”, it’s even more distasteful.

My “wife” and I simply don’t care about meeting the unjustified expectations of our societies's outgoing generations. However, in order to bring my family to the U.S. this December, under current post-9/11 law, I must obtain at least a fiancee visa which stipulates that I must marry my “wife” within 90 days of entering the U.S. If I choose not to take that option, I must marry my “wife” in Japan and then wait three months before going to the U.S.

Not that this constitutes an extraordinary and burdensome violation of my civil liberties or anything (although the government’s effectively forcing two people to to enter into a contract does seem to violate the underlying principles of a free society.), but I find it absurdly ironic that two people who couldn't care less about getting married and just want to be left alone are forced to marry each other so they can be more easily tracked by the post-9/11 state; this while millions of gay couples who want to marry each other are not allowed to in the name of protecting some archaic and amorphous ancien regime which serves little or no civil purpose in modern times.

So, since marriage doesn’t really make sense for us two members of different civilizations, and does for some gay people in the U.S., but structures remain in place preventing us potential suppliers from supplying and those same unjustified structures prevent myriad demands from being satisfied, I would like to suggest a solution that may even be palatable to certain gay-hating conservatives: “marriage choice” a.k.a. vouchers!

Can we deregulate marriage and create some sort of market system here, where I could sell my right to marry bequethed me as a heterosexual by the state to some wealthy gay couple?

Comments

[James]

Christopher, I only hope life treats you kinder than it did me. I was just like you, twenty-odd years ago. My partner and I refused to marry for various personal and political reasons. How I wish we'd done so - and divorced eventually - and saved ourselves the trouble. Instead, I've found myself spending the past couple of decades living as a single parent in Japan (admittedly quite happily) and rueing the amount of time I've had to spend justifying my choices, my decisions, and my child's very existence to various social agencies, educational authorities, and virtually every other person that we know. As a single-parent gaijin household, we are still regarded as freaks and oddities, and that's been very hard for me, not to mention my child. Everything has been so hard, for both of us. Please think of your children!

My child is now an adult, who has done very well in the school system here (currently a student at a national university, and an accomplished musician). But if I could go back in time, I would've done the right thing and signed that little piece of paper that sanctioned my child's existence in the eyes of the law, not to mention society. As I've mentioned, everything has been so hard for us, and I can't count the hundreds of hours that I've spent trying to justify my lifestyle choices, exhausting hours that I could've spent doing far more worthwhile stuff with my life. Why don't you do the right thing, for the sake of your wife and children? Trust me, unless you do, you'll never be taken seriously in this country.