I should really mention the big events taking place in my life, namely, getting married to the boy and moving to LA. I guess I haven’t mentioned the marriage thing really because it seems a bit surreal. Also, this isn’t a blog about my upcoming wedding (though I’m addicted to East Side Girl, who is about to get married). I think the real reason I don’t mention marriage or my wedding is that I’ve never been the sort of girl who imagined herself getting married or walking down the aisle in white, or walking around a fire in red (which I will probably do in January!) What I did imagine, as a child and then teenager, was having a daughter, a lover who supported me but let me be myself, living in Europe, somewhere warmer and more colourful than Brussels, and writing. The boy fits my image of the guy I’d end up with – he was always brown in my mind’s eye and free wheeling – though somehow, he was more a market stall type than a PhD economist.
Anyway, my point is that I never sought marriage though I did seek partnership. But in the end, marriage has become of some importance and I need it for social and practical reasons. The world, more specifically some nation states, like the US, are not generous to the unmarried couples. I need marriage to live with the boy in the US – that simple, hence our civil knot tying in June in Hawaii. I also would like the social celebration of our love and the acceptance that we are really a couple (by his friends, family on both sides etc) and thus the wedding in India in January. What comes with marriage is that we get to sleep in the same bed wherever we are, his friends have to deal with us as a set, read grown-up, couple (no more sharing of beds with them etc), and we make a commitment to each other that whispered words as live-ins just don’t measure up to somehow. In the end, that public gesture and verbalization of our love and the "community's" celebration of it carries with it some secret magic.
In light of my own evolvement towards my own marriage (though I would never suggest that any couple needs marriage to be legit), and my general views on homosexuality, I find it appalling that in this day and age where sex is just another act, we cannot accept same-sex love enough to offer it the same community acceptance that we do to heterosexual love. I don’t ask of religions to accept gay couples, but the liberal-democratic state, should be blind to homosexuality and heterosexuality and look instead at humanity. For the same reasons that I need/want marriage, plenty of my gay friends do too – and most of them are in relationships many a hetero would love to be in! So, why sanction one set and condemn another? No one should have the monopoly on defining love and partnership and certainly not in terms of gender! Such state based morality is old fashioned and paternalistic to say the least - and - it is time to move on, as we did on banning inter-racial affairs. My own Canada, of which I am so proud of in this arena, is now to re-debate the question under this new, conservative government and I can only hope my fellow citizens have the energy to stand up again and tell the government to butt its nose out of what constitutes our "love".
This post says it all:
Blogging for LGBT Families at http://twouteruses.blogspot.com
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