Small Strokes Big Oaks

This is a guest post in a series on feminism and relationships.  If you’d like to submit a guest post for this series, see the guidelines here and submit your post to samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com.

Lacey is a 27-year-old college writing teacher and an editor for Equality 1o1. She also plays saxophone and will hopefully have a piano in her home soon. She believes that marriage isn’t for her, really, but that it works for lots of people. What follows is a post about her experiences with thinking about marriage and determining what works for her; these experiences shouldn’t be taken as commentary on anyone else’s decision to get married or not. She thinks that adults who want to be married should be allowed to marry whom they choose, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.

My boyfriend and I just celebrated three years of dating. Before we started dating, I had determined that I was not interested in getting married to anyone, ever. The way I saw it, the only significance marriage had for me was the potential to lower my taxes somehow. I didn’t, and don’t, understand US tax law well at all (I just hope that TurboTax churns out the numbers correctly), but I knew that was pretty much the only good reason I could see to get married. Otherwise, it would make no real, noticeable difference in my life and my relationships.

I saw plenty of good reasons not to get married, too, like, what if I get too comfortable and I forget how to support myself? What if we get divorced anyway and then we have to go through the state to break up? What if our families see our marriage as a reason to start hassling us about having kids (which we don’t want)? What if I – or, worse, my boyfriend – begin to see my title of “wife” as good reason for me to begin behaving like the stereotypical “wife”?

That last one probably scared me off marriage the most. For the most part, our cultural beliefs and stereotypes about marriage are thoroughly ingrained in us all, including me. I wasn’t sure if I could maintain my self as I wanted under the heavy mantle of marriage as we seem to understand it culturally. I wasn’t sure I could be an individual who happened to be married to another individual. The idea of marriage seemed to carry with it all these expectations that would necessarily change our relationship with each other and my relationship with myself – and not for the better. For whatever reason, the girlfriend-boyfriend situation seems less heavy, less laden with expectations about behavior and housework.

My boyfriend has been on the same page since the first day. His reasoning has been more about the inequity and unfairness of the institution of marriage in this country: why is it that he can get married just because he likes women, but his friends and co-workers who happen to be homosexual can’t marry the people they love? He also hasn’t found a really good reason to get married beyond the tax benefits. So, we’re a good match. We have a solid relationship and neither of us really sees a need to do more to prove or validate our relationship.

However, lately, I’ve been thinking about marriage. Not weddings or receptions, though those make cameos occasionally, but the idea of being married. This is odd for me. I haven’t been the type to daydream about weddings, engagement rings (I don’t like rings, period), or bridal gowns, and I haven’t given serious thought to actually getting married in probably three or four years. On top of that, this thinking is totally unprompted by my boyfriend – as far as I can tell, things are the same with us, and he feels as he always has about marriage. So, once I realized that I was thinking and talking about getting married more often than usual, and that these thoughts were accompanied by anxiety instead of desire or strength, I set about figuring out what had changed in my life, in myself, that was making me feel a heretofore non-existent need for marriage.

I’m no psychologist, but I think I’ve been feeling kind of insecure, both in my relationship and in my life situation. Three years is the longest relationship I’ve ever had, and the same goes for my boyfriend. We bought a house together last year. I’m no longer in school, and I work what should be my dream job, but isn’t in a lot of ways. I don’t make as much as I would like. I don’t have a lot of job security. I’m considering a career change. My boyfriend works a lot. I might need to buy a car soon. My sister’s engaged. I have what amounts to a mother-in-law, which I’ve never had, and I’m not very good at developing that relationship in a positive way.

Basically, I’m navigating a boatload of uncharted – and stressful – territory right now. And that scares the bejeezers out of me.

So, what am I doing? I’m looking for signposts, landmarks, places to tether, things to hold onto. The closest thing that I have tangible power to control is my relationship with my boyfriend. In my stress-addled brain, it seems that the logical thing to do is to get married to him. Because marriage is forever, right? It’s permanent. There’s a piece of paper that says you’re married. You can hold that out to people and say, “I’m married.” There’s evidence and paper-trails and causal links between you and the commitment that, before, had felt ethereal and vulnerable. Marriage is like a shield against all things unknown and unknowable.

But, you know, it’s not. It’s just a more formal version of what I already have, and it can end just as easily and quickly.

Yes, my life is changing, and my relationship with my boyfriend is changing as well. We’re growing up, both together and separately. I’ve realized that the way to navigate these changes is not to hold on tighter, not to grit my teeth and close my eyes and hope the changes go away and leave me unmarked. The way to navigate them is to believe in myself, to be confident in myself, and to know that whatever happens – if we break up, if we get married, if we simply cohabitate for the next 80 years – I will come out changed, yes, but still myself, still whole.