Gay marriage is the best marriage

Speaking from my personal experience, anyway.

This past week Sam and I celebrated our 1 year wedding anniversary.¹ Yay for us! It wasn’t a wild, crazy celebration or anything, but we exchanged gifts and went to a nice restaurant. We ate the remainder of our wedding cake that had been sitting in our freezer for the last year (surprisingly, it held up really well). As Sunday evenings go, it was really nice.

And of course, we got to reflect back on our wedding and this past year. The thing about weddings is (and everyone always says this, I know), they go by so, so fast. Honestly it feels like the whole thing — cocktail reception the night before, ceremony, dinner, reception and the band and the music and the after party and friends from out of town and friends from in-town and family — it felt like it was all over in about 10 minutes. Without the photos we have from that day, I’m not sure we’d remember anything, just because the whole day was so, so, so full of people and events and emotions and (the good kind of) anxiousness. It was just a lot to take in. We had a great time.

Mazel tov!

And I think our first year of marriage was a success, too! We had a lovely honeymoon. We did holidays with our families. We got to take a great summer vacation with friends. I’d like to think we’re off to a good start. We’re a week into year 2, and so far so good. :)

I’m not sure how to say this next part, and it’ll probably take me several tries, but the thing is.. of course I’m glad I married Sam. He’s wonderful. But I’m particularly glad that, like.. I married someone who’s gay. We have a gay marriage, is what I mean, and that’s way better than me trying to imagine myself in a straight marriage.

Honeymoon in the most perfect place on early (otherwise known as Italy)

Everyone who’s gay has their own path that they have to travel in figuring out their sexuality, of course. I’ve written some about my own experience previously. I didn’t know I was gay for a long time. It wasn’t like, innate for me, from childhood. I knew early on that I was kinda nerdy and precious and I found a lot of the usual boy-oriented stuff to be tiresome or violent.. but it was a while before I connected the dots from there to being gay, I guess. So I had this long period in my late teens and 20s when like.. I was of an age to be “in the game,” when it came to dating or sex, but I had no idea what I was doing. More than that, I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere when it came to this stuff.  I could be gay, I figured. But I could also be straight. Maybe, on some level, I could make it work either way. I was feeling my way in the dark.

But to the extent that I ever tried to make it work in straight world, I was really bad at it.  I don’t just mean to say that like, I’m gay, therefore I was obviously bad at being straight.  This isn’t just like, me saying I’m a Kinsey 6, and therefore could never make it work. I’m more like a Kinsey 4, if I’m honest.  But to put it bluntly, I was bad at being straight because everything just felt so gendered.  I was me, dating or trying to date or hooking up or trying to hook up with a Person, but I was also Man, playing the Man role, trying to act out those things with someone in the Woman role. There’s the obvious stuff that everyone always talks about – a first date in straight world comes with certain expectations about who does the asking out, who pays (or at least make the default move to pay), who steers things in the direction of a second date and so on. But that was really only part of it. More than just dating mechanics, there was a burden I always felt by being one half of a straight partnership, and it was a burden I just wasn’t comfortable with. I didn’t want any of these expectations, and I would just as soon have rejected all of them, but they were there. As far as I could tell, being straight necessarily meant participating in all of straight world’s rules and games and expectations, and I just .. couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me.

I’m glad that I’m gay, and it really works for me. But more than that, and I don’t mean this as any form of disrespect to anyone, I’m especially glad that I’m not straight.²

Sam and I have a marriage that’s definitionally free of gender norms and expectations. There are no “rules” about who’s expected to be a homemaker, who’s expected to know how to use power tools and fix things, or who’s expected to be good at cooking stuff or sewing a button on a shirt.³ We don’t have children yet, but we’re free of the myriad expectations that go along with that, too. And I just .. I could not imagine myself in a marriage that had those things. We have a partnership that’s up to us to define.  We get to say who does what, based on who has what strengths and weaknesses, and who’s willing to make what sacrifices in order to benefit us both.  Maybe it’s just the psychological difference – that our marriage feels more unrestrained because society’s notion of gay marriage has only existed for a fraction of a second, relative to the old-as-Adam-and-Eve institution of straight marriage.  But Sam and I are making it up as we go along, and so far, we like what we’ve come up with.

Ernie, come read my blog.

And I mean.. to be fair, I’m certainly not trying to malign straight marriage.  The survival of the species quite literally depends on straight people finding each other and getting along!  But for me there’s an almost . . . I don’t know.  Misogyny is too strong a word.  It’s not that.  But it is an uncomfortable.. imbalance of a sort.  We’re all liberal-minded, equality-conscious people, and we are not our grandparents. No one I’m friends with (or would want to be friends with) would ever dream of insisting on adherence to strict gender-normative stereotypes in their partnership. But like.. even if you reject those stereotypes, they still exist. Gender differences – men are a certain way, women are another way – are real as a category, even if particular individuals choose to reject them.  And rejecting those differences is always hard and will always involve a lot of swimming upstream.  I’d like to think that, in time, all types of marriages will be strengthened and improved by society accepting gay marriage as a more equitable and fair model.  But for now, we still live in the world that is, and it’s … unfair.  And unbalanced.

I guess that’s really my point. The flailing, hopeless awkwardness I always felt when trying to perform the gender role of Man in the Man and Woman Do a Dating/Sexual Thing game always felt like it would sour me on the experience as a whole.  I couldn’t get past it.  But to the extent that many people can find their way through a straight relationship, they still have to contend with an awful lot.  And I don’t envy them for it.

I saw this tweet thread recently, and it gets at a lot of these same themes and says things better than I can. I’m not going to unroll the whole thread here, but it’s worth a read. It starts off really negative and kinda “hard and painful truths”-like, but I think it’s ultimately just very practical and honest and affirming. It’s useful perspective for both straight and gay marriages, but particularly straight ones.  A true partnership of equals is pretty hard to achieve — and heaping a bunch of extremely gendered ideas about happiness and fulfillment on the partnership can only make it worse.

joanna schroeder @iproposethis

Women married to men LOVE to complain about husbands, but few admit that being married doesn't live up to the hype that our society places upon it. We are drowned wedding culture & expectations for women to be married all while utterly unprepared for what marriage actually is.

Marriage is long and challenging because life is long and challenging (if you’re lucky). Sam and I haven’t hit any particularly difficult spots yet, but that’s not to say we won’t. Life will not always be like it is right now, and odds are good there are probably worse days and better days still ahead. If you dwell too much on that fact, you can kind of freak yourself out a bit, so best to just take it a day at a time. But I can absolutely say I’m glad there aren’t gendered expectations intertwined with whatever challenges Sam and I are going to have to face. I don’t know how we’re going to balance our jobs with raising children. I don’t know if money will ever become a big problem for us, or if one of us will get stuck in a job that makes us miserable. But we’re certainly not in this to make it harder for one another.  Neither of us wants to be saddled with certain obligations or inhibitions about what we can do just because of our gender. And that’s a comforting thing to reflect on. Life and marriage are hard enough as it is.

1. It was actually almost two weeks ago, but this post took a hell of a long time to write.

2. My mom told me once that one of her good friends (a friend who is probably more honest than she should be some of the time, but a friend nevertheless), once asked her if she (my mom) was ever disappointed that I was gay. And my mom, being the incredibly smart and compassionate and sensible person that she is, said — well, no. How can she even answer that question? Because if I wasn’t gay I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I’d be some other, StraightNigel who doesn’t exist and who isn’t her son. The son she has and knows and loves is gay and that’s what is. The straight guy is an imagined fantasy alternative, and who’s to say what that person would even be like?  So she can’t just picture some other Nigel who’s something else and say that person would be “better.” To get all mushy about it in the truest, realest sense, she loves me for me, as I am. Which.. I mean.. thanks, mom. It’s a good lesson to take to heart. </endmushyfootnote>

3. For the record — I’m slightly better at fixing stuff / figuring out how stuff works. We both can cook pretty well. Neither one of us knows how to sew a button.