im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says ‘this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"
You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.
Adding to this:
- This is why it is not assimilationist for gay/queer people to want to enshrine marriage rights in their country/region
- Similarly, this is why polyamorous people are fighting for the right to have their relationships recognised by their states through marriage and/or similar agreements
- Oh, and because on top of those aforementioned financial and medical protections, these laws also help you maintain connection to any kids you have and/or raise together!
- I would go further and say, this is why we really should be looking to expand some of these rights so that marriage is NOT the only way they should be enshrined. (e.g. Why could I get married tonight to a guy I met this morning, and get him on my health insurance, but I cannot do the same for a sibling?)
Remember the fight for same sex marriage was never “we feel left out”, it was “we’re sick and not allowed to see each other. We’re dying and not allowed at the funeral. Someone who kicked me out at 14 just showed up for the first time 24 years later to tell the doctor to pull the plug, and they did.”
Marriage is a legal documentation of rights. Fully agree with prev that those rights should be divested from the concept of monogamy entirely, but for now we have to at least understand what they are
I need the tumblr kiddos to understand that when my wife and I got married in 2013 we had to plan our vacations to ensure we only visited states where our marriage was legal, because otherwise if my wife got sick (not unlikely, she has multiple chronic conditions) I might not even be allowed to visit her in the hospital.
Every older queer you know who is in a longterm relationship will have similar stories of how we planned our whole lives to protect what would have been granted nigh automatically if we were heterosexual.
Marriage is a legal status that confers certain protections and rights, and until societies introduce other ways to get those protections and rights, we need it even if we hate it as an institution.
There’s a fantastic book about platonic partnerships by Rhaina Cohen called The Other Significant Others, and it has a really interesting chapter about marriage. There is a truly mind-boggling number of legal rights and protections attached to marriage, and Cohen examines how attaching all these rights to a single legal relationship really fails large swaths of people.
I can’t remember many of the details because it’s been a bit since I read it, but I’d highly recommend requesting this book from your local libraries if you can.
I have one hell of an irl story in relation to this: My wife and I are both trans. Currently, I’m legally recognized as F and her as M on our documents, which is probably why we could get married so easily. The issue is I look like a cis guy with F on my documents and soon she’s gonna look like a cis woman with M on her documents. The problem is, she’s from Brazil and I’m from Canada. That’s fine in theory, but in legal practice, it’s an obstacle. We want to travel between Brazil and Canada to see our families and friends ofc, but first of all, the US is in the way and potentially landing there for any reason is so scary to us as trans people. Second, we wanted to wait to marry, or maybe even not marry at all and just live together, but in order for us to not be separated, we had to marry.