By all means - marry!

This is the text of a presentation I gave at 'Politics in the Pub' at The Wickham on Tuesday April 28th, 2009.


Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. Look at the words we use: ‘bonds’ of matrimony, holy ‘wedlock’, ‘tie the knot’ – sounds more like an invitation to a dungeon party than a life commitment to loving mutual support!

And what about all the jokes:

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.

I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste.
The underlying hostility and just sheer misogyny in much of this so-called humour is hard to miss.

And then of course there’s the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Marriage is a great institution. But who wants to be institutionalised?

Well, lots of us in 21st century Australia, apparently. In 2001, the majority of the population over the age of 15 were married, almost 6% more than at the beginning of the 20th century. Australian marriage rates are higher than in most European and Scandinavian countries, though lower than the US and Muslim and Asian nations. Australians generally wait until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So getting married is alive and well in contemporary Australia.

However, pronounced cracks are appearing in the institution of marriage in this country. At the moment, about a third of Australian marriages end in divorce, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 46% of all 1999 marriages will eventually end in divorce. More and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – and 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. Yet while many heterosexual people are bypassing the institution altogether, and even more are leaving by the back door through separation and divorce, gay and lesbian people are hammering on the front door, demanding to be allowed in. I think we should pause first and consider whether it’s a social institution that will genuinely enhance our relationships and our families.

Marriage as we now understand it came into being to safeguard men’s property and inheritance rights. A man needed to know who his “legitimate” offspring were in order to make sure his property went to his descendants, so that his line would be perpetuated. Thus he needed to know that he had exclusive sexual access to his female mate. However, it was generally accepted that his fidelity would be less strictly enforced. Addressing the issue of the “double standard” has meant that monogamy is now expected from males as well as females. How realistic this expectation actually is remains open to debate! The main point, however, is that marriage has historically been about property and dynastic alliances, for the upper and subsequently the middle classes – working class people often couldn’t afford to marry, and ‘de facto’ unions were commonplace (which is why they used to be known as ‘common law’ marriages). The average Australian wedding today costs around $45,000, and once again marriage is becoming a privilege reserved to the propertied classes.

Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that heterosexual marriage as an institution favours men – married men enjoy better physical health and greater life expectancy, earn more on average, and suffer lower rates of depression, than single men, whereas single women have better physical and mental health, higher earnings, and greater longevity than married women. Statistics show that when a cohabiting heterosexual couple marry, the husband does less housework and the wife does more. Same couple, same home – but suddenly, different roles.

Marriage has been an oppressive institution for many women, but also for many men, a place of constraint, duty and obligation, of abandoned hopes and bitter disappointment. Yet we continue to turn to marriage as one of our highest ideals for relationship and human fulfilment, for mutual support and loving commitment. What continues to propel us there?
In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes explains that in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels; there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the hermaphrodite, who was half man, half woman. They offended Zeus who chopped them in half. Ever since that time, the poet says, people say they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature; this is why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
I think today, we both long for this ‘oneness’ with another human being, but at the same time we suspect it may not be possible, or perhaps even desirable – we don’t want to lose our unique identity, or give up the opportunity to grow and flourish as individual human beings. Perhaps the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has put this most eloquently.

“You who are not and will never be mine are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you, because you are transcendent to me. A gap remains between me and you, between you and me. I will never be capable of perceiving you completely, and not even of loving you, or of speaking to you completely. Perceiving you does not involve losing me or you; my perception must remain a path towards you, towards us, an us which is always disunited, distanced, always a “two” irreducible to one. We can each become, the one for the other, a bridge towards a becoming which is yours, mine, and ours. I can be a bridge for you, as you can be one for me. This bridge can never become the property of either. What captures my attention can teach me how to sustain your becoming, how to approach you, how to dialogue with you”.

Marriage is inimical to the process Irigaray describes. It fosters the illusion of security, of ownership, an assumption of intimacy and longevity unearned and taken for granted. The Judaeo-Christian tradition on which our laws and social institutions were founded promotes such a view. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians directs that the wife’s body belongs to her husband and the husband’s body belongs to his wife. It wasn’t until 1991 that the Australian High Court abolished a ruling that exempted any husband from being convicted of rape if his victim was his wife. “A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife”, Genesis tells us, “and they will become one flesh”. But this one flesh was for all legal and practical purposes the flesh of the husband. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, upon marriage the husband and wife became one person under British law - the property of the wife was surrendered to her husband, and her legal identity ceased to exist.

Yes the law has changed, but I think this still illustrates the fundamental problem of marriage – that for it to work, one or both individual identities must be subsumed under the other’s identity, or some new joint identity. By its very nature it forecloses on personal growth, on taking individual responsibility for our flourishing as human beings. Too often one exploits the other, and the other becomes complicit in their own exploitation. Or both give up interests, dreams, possibilities for the sake of the relationship.

I would argue that marriage involves roles thousands of years old, roles in which we were raised, in which our parents were raised, in which almost everyone in our social networks were raised, roles that come with implicit expectations and assumptions that are often not even articulated. At least same-sex and poly partnerships offer the opportunity to interrogate and negotiate those roles; marriage threatens to lay the dead weight of tradition over the creative, complex and shifting ways we are learning to do intimacy and family.

We have a choice. We can go with the tired old traditions which no longer fit modern aspirations and lifestyles. We can settle for the same as everyone else, based on religious and legal principles that discriminate against us, exclude us, and even persecute us. Principles based on biological kinship and the protection of the interests of propertied white men. Or we can continue, as we have done up to this point, to show our society new ways to do intimate relationships, to do family. Relationships based on honesty and communication, the hard work of continuously negotiating and renegotiating our commitments to each other and to our children. Not the one-size-fits-all white shroud of a dying tradition, but the living, dynamic, risky, creative challenge of continually fashioning and refashioning the relationships that fit each one of us, in whatever combinations of individuals that we choose to have in our lives. Marriage is an illusion, a myth, truly a case of the Emperor’s new clothes. Let’s commit ourselves to continually designing and creating new garments that are reflexive and responsive to the changing seasons of our lives and the unpredictability and idiosyncrasies of our growth and development as human beings.

Washing Machine Liberation

The washing machine has had a greater liberating role for women than the pill, the official Vatican daily newspaper said in an International Women’s Day commentary. “The washing machine and the emancipation of women: put in the powder, close the lid and relax”, said the headline in Osservatore Romano.

“In the 20th century, what contributed most to the emancipation of western women? The debate is still open. Some say it was the pill, others the liberalisation of abortion, or being able to work outside the home. Others go even further: the washing machine”, the article claimed, so that now there is “the image of the super woman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”.

This reflection, prompted by International Women’s Day, on what has contributed most to the emancipation of women begs the question – emancipation from what?

Women's organisations and governments around the world observe International Women’s Day annually on 8 March by holding large-scale events that honour women's advancement and promote international efforts for women's rights and participation in social, political and economic processes. These advances include women’s access to formal education, including tertiary study, and thus access to paid work and the professions, including the right to keep working after marriage and having children. Political rights such as the right to vote and to run for elected office. Women’s economic rights, such as owning property, being able to get bank loans without a husband or father to be guarantor, to run their own businesses. Women’s rights over their own bodies, such as whether and who they will marry or partner with, whether and how many children they will bear, and very recently, the right not to be raped by their own husbands. The right to leave an abusive relationship. Simple rights like being able to move around in public on their own, to wear clothing of their own choosing, to play sports, join clubs, travel, read books, join or leave religious groups. In other words, fundamental human rights that most of us take for granted.

And the Roman Catholic church has actively opposed every step of this journey. Its theology of gender and human relationships revolves around the idea of women bearing children and caring for families in meek submission to their husbands; or else as servants of the church in religious orders. The Roman Catholic church has opposed education for women, female suffrage, women entering the paid labour market, and it still opposes divorce and all forms of contraception. Even its own female saints were usually vilified and oppressed during their lifetimes – Australia’s Mary MacKillop was excommunicated by her bishop who attempted to disband her order.

Which leaves the Roman Catholic Church with little to celebrate on International Women’s Day.

It opposes the pill, and abortion. It regards women working outside the home with disfavour, believing this results in women neglecting their families. The Vatican recently excommunicated the mother of a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was pregnant with twins after being raped by her step-father, for authorizing an abortion. The doctors were also excommunicated. It still does not allow women priests. It opposes the use of condoms in Africa, condemning millions of women each year to HIV infection.

And so we are given this farcical picture of the “super woman, smiling, made-up and radiant among the appliances of her house”. It would be laughable if the Roman Catholic Church did not still wield so much power and influence over the lives of women around the world. It reveals a male-dominated hierarchy completely out of touch with women’s lives and the very real challenges they face in achieving fundamental social, economic and political rights. Western women in general, even members of the Church, have clearly come to disregard the church’s teachings on most of the issues that affect them, and have achieved a degree of emancipation despite its trenchant opposition. Women in developing nations where the church has influence unfortunately still face enormous difficulties from an institution that has an appalling track record on the emancipation of women. Where achieving justice for women is concerned, I would say the Roman Catholic Church is all washed up.

Clothes maketh the man? A dialogue with Woolf's "Orlando".

Virginia Woolf (1928; 1995) Orlando: a biography. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Classics; pp. 92-93.
Virginia Woolf's close friend, Vita Sackville-West, was the model of the androgynous hero of Orlando. The deliberately fanciful story spans a period from the 16th to the 20th centuries and takes the hero, Orlando, from being a handsome boy of 16, through encounters with Elizabeth I to a love affair with a Muscovites Princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters, now as Lady Orlando, with Pope, Addison and Swift, and childbirth.

[Orlando] was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, being cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which was to be found even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made to his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

This provokes me to wonder if the evolution of my gender identity would have even begun had I not gone to the podiatrist. Orthotics require particular shoes and well constructed joggers are of course the best. Wearing joggers every day profoundly changed my choice of clothes. Although I had mostly worn pants since becoming a lesbian, I now found myself wearing simpler clothes and less jewellery. After a while this became very comfortable; I especially liked not having to worry about what to wear, knowing it was most likely going to be jeans and a black T-shirt.

On those occasions when I did dress in a more feminine way, such as Joel's wedding and Zac's christening, not only were the clothes and makeup and jewellery uncomfortable, but I became resentful at all the compliments and fuss that was made of my appearance. 'This is how it works', I thought, 'this is what keeps us doing these absurd things and spending all this money, for the compliments and approval that women and men give you for doing femininity'.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual -- openness indeed was the soul of her nature -- something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which must result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effects it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.

I'm not sure here if Woolf is being ingenuous, or if she is playing with us. Orlando is based on Vita Sackville-West, who several times eloped with Violet Trefusis, and when they lived together Vita dressed as a male. Woolf herself was also sexually involved with Vita. Here within her experience was a woman who demonstrated the vacillation between the sexes that Woolf describes. So why does Woolf insist on the profundity of the difference between the sexes? Or is she playing with us, by stating the prevailing view, but demonstrating the complete opposite? And is there any significance in the fact that in the novel Orlando lives for a couple of centuries as a man before becoming a woman, and her process of becoming a woman takes place in the course of a week in which she lies in a kind of coma? Whereas Vita's transformations were comparatively frequent and temporary. Is this simply a literary convenience for the sake of the plot, or is she perhaps accusing Vita of being a gender dilettante?

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than 10 minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.

This is a lovely passage in the sense that it shows quite eloquently the social specificity of gender stereotypes, yet also how enduring they can be. The time and attention spent on clothes rings true to us today (I wonder if anyone has actually researched the comparison between men and women on the time spent dressing?) as does the male love of power and the tender-heartedness of women. However, I suspect contemporary women have equal capacities with men when it comes to drinking, gambling, and driving, and the figures are showing they are doing better than men in university and the gender gap in mathematics has all but disappeared. I know that Woolf herself was embittered that she was not given the same education as her brothers; I suspect that she is once again playing with gender stereotypes in order to expose their fundamental absurdity.

So what is she saying to us by means of Orlando? To me it seems her message is that the so-called 'profound' differences are largely artificial and perpetuated by social customs particularly focusing on dress. This seems to work in two ways; that when we take on gender stereotypical clothing we take on the stereotypes themselves, whether embodied, mental, or emotional. The other way is that our society demands that our attitudes and behaviours concord with our clothing, with our gender presentation. Perhaps then it is true that 'clothes maketh the man'.

Queer Intimacies

I’ve just been reading Michael Warner’s “The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life”, and the following passage really struck me:

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way, intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly unchartered territory – whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the “fag hag” label. There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our parents or school or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends’ tricks and tricks’ bar friends and gal pals and companions “in the life”. Queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability. They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from straight people. Who among us would give them up?
Try standing at a party of queer friends and charting all the histories, sexual and nonsexual, among the people in the room . . . You will realize that only a fine and rapidly shifting line separates sexual culture from many other relations of durability and care. The impoverished vocabulary of straight culture tells us that people should be either husbands and wives or (nonsexual) friends. Marriage marks that line. It is not the way many queers live. If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends. (pp. 115-116).

I feel some kind of erotic charge with most of my female friends (gay or straight) that I just don’t feel with hardly any men (geez, do you think I might be a lesbian????). It doesn’t mean I’m going to jump their bones or anything, I think it’s just a sort of joyful arousal that simply makes me feel good. Plato and his mob certainly believed this to be an aspect of the relationships between men (of their class, I hasten to add), which had nothing to do with partnering and family, and ideally would lead them all on to the love of wisdom (philosophy), but they saw no need to deny the erotic in the process.

The challenge for me is in recognising this but then knowing what to do with it. I think often in the past it’s led me into relationships that were never going to work. But having said that, I have no regrets about any of them (even the ones that hurt) because I’ve learned and grown so much from all of them.

The other main problem is that I don’t know how to go from a place of greater to lesser intimacy. It simply feels so unsatisfactory to me, like I’m not fully present, I’m on my guard. Plus I can’t bear the thought of someone I’m still very attracted to with someone else, enjoying the intimacy that I crave. Clearly I have a lot of progress still to make as a human being!

Women need men like female sharks need - well, male sharks.

"Birds do it, bees do it, and now there is evidence that female sharks are able to do it on their own -- without the contribution of male DNA. A recent report from a team of American and Irish researchers has concluded that the mysterious appearance in 2001 of an infant female bonnethead shark at Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo in a tank that held only two adult female sharks was the result of parthenogenesis (Gr. virgin birth.) Parthenogenic reproduction takes place without fertilization by a male through the process of cell division, when the mother’s egg fuses with a degenerative cell called a polar body, producing a new individual.

What does this mean for lonely-heart sharks on a Saturday night, or for that matter, the evolution of the species? “Parthenogenesis appears to be a rare phenomenon in sharks, and it is unlikely to have an impact on the evolution of a particular lineage,” said Saint Joseph’s University Professor of Biology Eileen Grogan, Ph.D., a noted expert in shark evolution and research associate at both the Academy of Natural Sciences and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. “However, one might conceive that this mode of reproduction could have a significant impact on small populations because there is less genetic diversity in small, isolated populations.”

While parthenogenesis can ensure the short-term survival of the species, for the long term it is advantageous to keep male DNA in the mix. “The newborn shark derived from this phenomenon would have only half the genetic diversity of the sexually reproduced form because it is based entirely on the mother’s genome,” said Dr. Grogan. “In terms of evolution, it is preferable to have a greater diversity of genes, because that offspring is more likely to have ‘what it takes’ to survive.” "

Is it just me or is there a note of panic here, requiring the explicit justification of why we still need males? And is this the reason that while billions of dollars has been poured into IVF for heterosexuals, there has been next to no attention paid to parthenogenesis as a form of human reproduction? Just askin' . . . .

My Anzac Day Heroines

Maybe they were drunk . . . maybe they were delinquents . . . maybe their choice of protest wasn’t the best way to ‘win hearts and minds’ . . . but maybe they’re the last feminists left in Australia with the guts to critique the new Aussie secular religion of Anzac Day.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/sydneysiders-turn-out-in-force/2007/04/25/1177180684770.html

Five young women, aged 15 to 17, allegedly vandalised Bathurst's Carillion War Memorial last night. They had painted slogans like "ANZAC murderers" and "Aussies don't fight" in letters a metre high, along with peace symbols.

I'm not applauding graffiti, or damage to public property, but I have to say I rejoiced to find someone was protesting against the monstrous obscenity of war as it is celebrated on Anzac Day, and even more that it was a group of young women.

Seems to me the feminist critique of Anzac Day, and war in general, has become muted to the point of silence. Even women commentators I respect, like Fran Kelly on Radio National, and Geraldine Doogue, all seem keen to hop on the Anzac Day bandwagon.

Lest We Forget - war inevitably involves the death, rape and enforced sexual slavery of WOMEN. And although they try to unearth a few nurses or WACS for each celebration, the fact remains that it is an overwhelmingly masculinist celebration of bogus male virtues like bravery, 'mateship' and self sacrifice, which makes it incredibly difficult for the thousands of men who have been irreparably damaged physically, mentally and emotionally by the horrors of war to admit and then find appropriate treatment for its impact on their lives.

It's no accident that the two main focii of modern Australian nationalism - Anzac Day and the various football codes - render women practically invisible, merely cheering on hegemonic masculinity from the sidelines. Little wonder that Aussie women remain second class citizens, the structural economic and political barriers to their full inclusion and participation in Australian society largely unrecognised and unaddressed.

So I salute those young women who refused to be marginalised and ignored, no matter how many RSL branch presidents they have reduced to tears, or how "inappropriate" their methods - at least they've raised their spray cans in protest, which is more than I've managed to do.

By all means - Marry!

This was a piece I wrote for my son's wedding. I didn't end up giving it in this form, but I found it a very useful exercise, to look at my hostility to marriage, and to help me see social institutions, like marriage, as a lot more flexible than I had realised - a handy idea for a sociologist!


Clearly our society has a fairly ambivalent view of marriage. At the moment, about a third of Australian marriages end in divorce, and according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, about 46% of all 1999 marriages will eventually end in divorce. Feminist scholarship has been at pains to point out that marriage as an institution favours men – married men enjoy better physical health and greater life expectancy, earn more on average, and suffer lower rates of depression, than single men, whereas single women have better physical and mental health, higher earnings, and greater longevity than married women. Even though women participate in the paid work force more than ever before, they are still doing most of the domestic labour. The 2001 HILDA survey revealed that partnered men estimated on average that they spent 25.5 hours per week on domestic and child care tasks, while partnered women estimated that they spent 44.4 hours per week on the same tasks. But it’s not only women who have a jaundiced view of marriage - you just need to look at some of the jokes about it:

The Greek philosopher Socrates said: By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met. Rodney Dangerfield.

I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me.

I recently read that love is entirely a matter of chemistry. That must be why my wife treats me like toxic waste!

And then of course there’s the famous Groucho Marx quote:

Marriage is a great institution. But who wants to be institutionalised?

Well, lots of us in 21st century Australia, apparently. In 2001, the majority of the population over the age of 15 were married, and that was almost 6% more than at the beginning of the 20th century. Australian marriage rates are higher than in most European and Scandinavian countries, though lower than the US and Muslim and Asian nations. While it’s true that more and more couples are living together without getting married first – in 2001 it was 12.4% of all Australian couples – many end up marrying, and indeed, 72% of people now live with their partner before they marry. And couples are generally waiting until after they marry to have children; in 2001 69% of children were born to married mothers. So marriage is alive and well in contemporary Australia. And while many heterosexual people are bypassing the institution altogether, and even more are leaving by the back door, through separation and divorce, gay and lesbian people are hammering on the front door, demanding to be allowed in.

I guess the thing about social institutions, even more than ones made from bricks and mortar, is that they are flexible, they’re able to change and adapt to people’s changing lifestyles, different values, and divergent attitudes and expectations. My partner is a lecturer at the Ipswich campus of the University of Queensland – it’s a delightful place, full of Federation-style buildings set in spacious grounds. Its facilities date from the opening of the Ipswich branch of the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum in 1878. Many of the surviving buildings have been heritage-listed, have been restored and are now used as teaching and library space, computer labs, and staff offices. An institution for the confinement of tortured souls has become a place of learning, growth, and opportunity for many young Queenslanders.

Marriage may once have been, and may still be, an oppressive institution for many women and men, a place of constraint, duty and obligation, of abandoned hopes and bitter disappointment. Yet we continue to turn to marriage as one of our highest ideals for relationship and human fulfilment, for mutual support and loving commitment. What continues to propel us there?
Plato’s Symposium is a philosophical discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a series of speeches, both satirical and serious, given by a group of men at a drinking party. Plato has the comic poet, Aristophanes, explain why people in love say they feel "whole" when they have found their love partner. It is, he says, because in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels; there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the hermaphrodite, who was half man, half woman. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods, so Zeus decided to cripple them by chopping them in half. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. This is meant to explain why we feel incomplete without a ‘soul mate’.
This kind of thinking is also reflected in the biblical account of the creation of human beings, where God took a rib from the first man as he slept, and made the first woman out of it, described as a ‘suitable helper’ for the man. Genesis goes on to say, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh’, and this has formed the major part of the wedding ceremony, and our understanding of marriage, for many centuries.
I think today, we both long for this ‘oneness’ with another human being, but at the same time we suspect it may not be possible, or perhaps even desirable – we don’t want to lose our unique identity, or give up the opportunity to grow and flourish as individual human beings. Perhaps the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray, has put this most eloquently.

You who are not and will never be mine are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you, because you are transcendent to me. But this not being I, not being me or mine, makes speech possible and necessary between us.

I will never be you, you will never be mine. A gap remains between me and you, between you and me. I will never be capable of perceiving you completely, and not even of loving you, or of speaking to you completely. Perceiving you does not involve losing me or you; my perception must remain a path towards you, towards us, an us which is always disunited, distanced, always a “two” irreducible to one. We can each become, the one for the other, a bridge towards a becoming which is yours, mine, and ours. I can be a bridge for you, as you can be one for me. This bridge can never become the property of either. What captures my attention can teach me how to sustain your becoming, how to approach you, how to dialogue with you. What moves me can give rise to praise, to grace, to admiration.

Irigaray seems to be saying, if we accept our difference, our inability to become ‘one’ then we can help each other to discover each other, to continue to learn about one another as we grow and progress through life, that we can continue to be surprised, delighted and yes, sometimes challenged, by each one’s journey of becoming. This is the journey that Julie and Joel have been on for some time, but which they have committed themselves to take in each other’s company today, to be that path towards each other, that bridge towards a becoming, which celebrates their difference and lovingly supports their flourishing as fully rounded human beings. As a mother, this has been my greatest hope for my kids, and it gives me more joy than I can say to see my son safely launched on this adventure of life with such a wonderful partner. May they continually be moved to praise, to grace, to admiration as they behold each other on their journeys of becoming.