Here's the deal: I am secretly terrified of marriage (and, by extension, weddings). FaceTime and Skype and all those video calling apps and what-have-you's are convenient at best, annoying at worst. Every time some familiar face pops up on screen, the inevitable question would be "So, when are you two getting married?" (You two as in, almost everyone else your age is married/engaged/pregnant with 3rd child, yes, everyone, except you two.) Hell I know.
A few weeks ago, I discovered Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed in the local library-- the follow-up to her bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. Frankly, I never really read Eat, Pray, Love. The premise behind her story never appealed to me to begin with. After all, her story would not be unlike many others who traveled because of lost love, and who found love again in their wanderlust. But I must admit what drew me to Committed was the little tagline that read "A sceptic makes peace with marriage". In the sequel to Eat, Pray, Love, Liz (because, after reading Committed, I've decided that she's wholeheartedly funny enough to be someone I'd love to lunch with-- as in, Hi Liz, wanna grab some lunch at 12?) recounts the initial decision to get married to "that Brazilian guy from Eat, Pray, Love", and launches into eight insightful chapters examining the historical, cultural, political, religious and socioeconomical implications of matrimony. In her delightful discourse, peppered with her travel musings across Southeast Asia with Felipe, as well as with her own research on the topic that baffled her as much as it does me, Liz provides glimpses into her own relationship with the man who would eventually become legally married to her because of an unforeseen intervention by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
In Chapter 7: Marriage and Subversion, Liz confesses that she was dodging everyone's questions surrounding her wedding, because she "found the whole idea of a public wedding agitating". To see this in writing from another female species is marvelously welcoming. Of course, she eventually ends up getting married, because that's what this whole book is about-- her reconciliation with marriage and the idea behind it. However, to know that I'm not alone in my resistance to marriage provides me with heartwarming optimism, knowing that I'm not an odd female entity, after all.
I used to love weddings when I was younger. I don't know why-- maybe the idea of seeing love manifest in public ceremonial vows consolidates all hope that we will one day find The One. (Unfortunately, I have gradually come to realise that there's an ocean of words swimming between "The" and "One"-- The Goddamn One, The Crazy One, The Fucking Irresponsible One...) But as I attend weddings after weddings, each stretching out long into the nights with a drunken yuuuuuuum seeeeng!!!, I get more unnerved. Somewhere between feeding the groom and his best men wasabi sandwiches and toasting to yet another new couple, I lost my liking for weddings. I dislike the ceremonial pomp and all those traditions one has to adhere to (I'm basing this on a Chinese wedding where customs and semi-religious rituals blend into one big hoohah of a day). Now, my family is thankfully unconventional and may not impose weird superstitious practices on me, but I cannot say the same for my other half's. There is a considerable amount of people and practices involved when it comes to the holy union of two people, and I, for one, intend to preserve my sanity by avoiding wedding ceremonies as much as I can.
Liz echoed my sentiments when she asked "What is it about a public, legal wedding ceremony that means so much to everybody anyhow?". I. Know. Tell me about it! If you're hankering for a wedding, go get married yourself! Oh, oops, I forgot, you are married/engaged. Go fug yourself then. On a deeper level, though, Liz recognises that ceremonies are important to human beings for as long as traditional societies are formed. Rituals, she argues, provide a safe transition point to our next stage in life, and that without ceremonies and the witnesses participating in them, we wouldn't be able to distinguish the mundane from the extraordinary. So she theorised that the reason her friends and family asked of her to have a public wedding ceremony was so that they could safely acknowledge the social standing of Liz and Felipe in relation to everybody else (ie Felipe would hence be known as "husband", "uncle", "son-in-law of the Gilberts" etc). Assuming her point is valid and hence, applicable to everyone else in her shoes (ie those being pestered into matrimony), it makes sense, then, as to why our relatives and friends keep asking us a question we have no answer to-- When are you two getting married? I suppose it's less confusing for them to acknowledge us as a "married couple" rather than "high school sweethearts who have been dating for more than 10 years and still not married" (and start second guessing that one of us must be gay).
But what is it about social standing that is so important, even to Western societies like the one Liz grew up in? Having been brought up in an Asian background, I could see the significance of social standing (and hence, social order) in a culture deeply infused with Confucian philosophy. Unfortunately, Liz doesn't provide further insight into this conundrum of mine, so it would be a really good reason to ring her up for lunch, don't you think? But back to social standing. My pet peeve is that de facto partners should be allowed the same social acknowledgement as married partners too. If the Australian government recognises our relationship and proved so by having granted us spouse visas, why can't our families and friends see eye to eye on this matter? Why is marriage so important? As I have ranted before, legal proceedings don't mean anything if there was no love to foster, and the non-existance of a marriage certificate does not negate actual, mutual love between two individuals-- be they straight or gay.
One of my favourite quotes from Committed comes from Liz's friend Brian, with whom she had a discussion on marriage: "Marriage is not prayer. That’s why you have to do it in front of others, even in front of your aunt who smells like cat litter. It’s a paradox, but marriage actually reconciles a lot of paradoxes: freedom with commitment, strength with subordination, wisdom with utter nincompoopery etc. The main point is not to ‘satisfy’ other people, but that these ‘other people’ (ie your wedding guests—witnesses to the whole ordeal) have to help you with your marriage and support you, should either of you falter." He is funny, this Brian guy-- maybe I should invite him to lunch, too. But the point I want to make here is that 1) you don't need to have witnesses to your marriage if these witnesses (ie family and friends) already know about your relationship long enough to throw their hands up in exasperation and exclaim "I just don't understand why you don't want to get married!"; 2) even if either of you faltered in your relationship, the witnesses shouldn't turn a blind eye to your troubles if they sincerely wanted to help you (in other words, you shouldn't need to sign a legal document before them just so that they are obliged to help you out when you falter); 3) you don't need any other person more than the licensed priest/judge/commissioner of marriages to witness your marriage-- Fernando Torres (bless that boy!) and his wife got married in a little chapel with the priest, without any family members present; 4) should your marriage breakdown, who are they to tell you to mend it if it's been irreparable beyond any form of recognition?
I think Brian and I will have a very interesting lunchtime conversation, don't you think?
So what is marriage anyway? Like Liz and Felipe, who "had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved", The Boyfriend and I had also been "living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship—and what do you call that, if not marriage?". And like Liz and Felipe, who sealed their relationship in a little private ceremony in a "little decaying hotel" in Knoxville, 2005, by exchanging a pair of simple gold rings and reading out private vows to each other, The Boyfriend and I, too, have embarked on a ring quest and returned with a set of personally engraved Cartier rings, with the intention of having our own little ceremony of our own devising when a suitable time arrives (though, knowing The Boyfriend well enough by now-- he the one who said "Wedding? Scary? No... What's scarier is walking into Tiffany's and Co.", and who subsequently earned a playful smack on the forearm from yours truly-- a "suitable time" may never come and we may just end up wearing our rings upon walking out from the Cartier store anyway). I swear, when the idea of ring hunting struck, I had not started reading Committed, and had no idea that someone like Aunty Liz had already cooked up this idea and served it in Knoxville 6 years ago. We have so much in common, I tell you, I'm really starting to think of a lunch place.
In all honesty, though, in the eyes of everyone else, we are not legally married, but we feel as though we've been a boring old married couple now. We have our own set of private monosyllabic mumbles in which we manage to carry quite decent conversations at times. We don't just finish each other's sentences, but say out loud what the other person is thinking even before they start saying what we were saying. The other day, we were reminiscing about life in high school, when the subject of identity numbers arose (each student had their own 5-digit ID etched on our school badges). A 5-digit number floated to my consciousness, prompting me to blurt it out just as he was quizzing me on his ID number with a smirk on his face. I swear I did not even know his ID number, until some weird and funky 5-digit ID flashed across my mind. This telepathic thing is eerie, I tell you. The next time I see some weird and funky digits again, I'm going to buy a lottery ticket. You'd never know.
My mother was 27 years old when she gave birth to me. The Boyfriend's mother was already giving birth to her second child when she was 27. Now I am fucking 27 and everyone my age is either married or engaged or popping out babies like it's 1959. Sure, I can jump on the bandwagon too and change my Facebook status to "married", but the point is, what is marriage nowadays when anyone who has a Facebook account can blithely alter their marital status? Where is the sanctity of matrimony, then?
Last week, while FaceTiming with my aunt and cousins, there was a non-negotiable urge to "Faster get married so that you can have kids!", to which I dismissed with my usual air of cursory disinterest with the retort "Who says you need to get married before having kids, anyway?". Yes, I do realise the cultural background (Asian) in which I was brought up, and in which tradition dictates that having a baby out of wedlock would carry disastrous social consequences. But, seriously, how much worse can having a baby be for two people-- not legally married-- who are already living together and behaving pretty much like a married couple anyway? It seems to me that one of the goals of marriage is procreation, and there just seems to be something quite fundamentally wrong with this concept that I have yet to reconcile with. I simply refuse to see marriage as a license to have babies. Moreover, I don't see marriage as a legal permission for two people to have sex so that they can fulfil their societal duties by creating an offspring. How often do we hear about the single, unattached individual (let us not affix any gender assumptions here) who earns a despicable reputation by "sleeping around", and how often do we hear praise about the couple whose "third baby is along the way, hooray!"?
To a certain extent, I can see why procreation matters. It's a biological and anthropological need to extend our legacy on earth. But I have to say, realistically speaking, we all know when we are ready to have kids (well, most of us do, anyway). At a stage where the couple's not ready to start a family, it doesn't matter whether they're legally married or not, they're still not going to have kids. Reading Liz's research on marriage and children, I cannot help but agree with her interpretation that when "sociologists say that 'marriage is extremely good for children,' what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children." Children, as she puts it, need "constancy and familiarity". Marriage does encourage familial solidarity, but it cannot guarantee its consistency. How many children have been physically and psychologically scarred by their parents' marital breakdown? On the flipside, how many children thrived just as well when they're brought up by unmarried couples, single parents, relatives, grandparents, and sometimes even foster parents, when their environment is one of a calm and stable situation?
Look, I am acutely aware that this is probably my longest blog post ever-- and well done if you've managed this far, listening to yet another one of my rants about the frustrations of being gently coerced into getting hitched. Yes, I am 27 years old already (oh, don't I know!), and yes, I do realise I am perilously perched on the cusp of a critical, optimal period for childbearing. But I am only 27 years young. I want to travel. I want to see the world. I want to work outside of Australia for a period of time. If I were legally married, there will be pressure to have kids (hell, even at a stage where I'm not married, people are already dropping hints to have a baby, for fuck's sake). How can I possibly bring up a child in the most stable environment if I were uprooting from Australia to Papua New Guinea to South Africa? There's so much to learn. I cannot get married just yet. I don't think I can. It's not that I don't love The Boyfriend. It's a very different kind of love these days, one that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up after the dog. Liz would tell you that this is "real, sane, mature love" based on "affection and respect", and not just sole infatuation. But to link this kind of love with marriage is another thing. Marriage is when you bind your mutual love to your respective families as well. In her final chapter, Marriage and Ceremony, Liz concludes that marriage is "both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well." If you asked me-- a girl who values her freedom and who likes to think of herself as an "eccentric nonconformist", marriage is a wholesome, grotesquely unnerving affair while a wedding, let's just say, is ten times more nervewrecking.
But what is it about social standing that is so important, even to Western societies like the one Liz grew up in? Having been brought up in an Asian background, I could see the significance of social standing (and hence, social order) in a culture deeply infused with Confucian philosophy. Unfortunately, Liz doesn't provide further insight into this conundrum of mine, so it would be a really good reason to ring her up for lunch, don't you think? But back to social standing. My pet peeve is that de facto partners should be allowed the same social acknowledgement as married partners too. If the Australian government recognises our relationship and proved so by having granted us spouse visas, why can't our families and friends see eye to eye on this matter? Why is marriage so important? As I have ranted before, legal proceedings don't mean anything if there was no love to foster, and the non-existance of a marriage certificate does not negate actual, mutual love between two individuals-- be they straight or gay.
One of my favourite quotes from Committed comes from Liz's friend Brian, with whom she had a discussion on marriage: "Marriage is not prayer. That’s why you have to do it in front of others, even in front of your aunt who smells like cat litter. It’s a paradox, but marriage actually reconciles a lot of paradoxes: freedom with commitment, strength with subordination, wisdom with utter nincompoopery etc. The main point is not to ‘satisfy’ other people, but that these ‘other people’ (ie your wedding guests—witnesses to the whole ordeal) have to help you with your marriage and support you, should either of you falter." He is funny, this Brian guy-- maybe I should invite him to lunch, too. But the point I want to make here is that 1) you don't need to have witnesses to your marriage if these witnesses (ie family and friends) already know about your relationship long enough to throw their hands up in exasperation and exclaim "I just don't understand why you don't want to get married!"; 2) even if either of you faltered in your relationship, the witnesses shouldn't turn a blind eye to your troubles if they sincerely wanted to help you (in other words, you shouldn't need to sign a legal document before them just so that they are obliged to help you out when you falter); 3) you don't need any other person more than the licensed priest/judge/commissioner of marriages to witness your marriage-- Fernando Torres (bless that boy!) and his wife got married in a little chapel with the priest, without any family members present; 4) should your marriage breakdown, who are they to tell you to mend it if it's been irreparable beyond any form of recognition?
I think Brian and I will have a very interesting lunchtime conversation, don't you think?
So what is marriage anyway? Like Liz and Felipe, who "had started creating a little world for ourselves that looked suspiciously like marriage long before the immigration authorities ever got involved", The Boyfriend and I had also been "living together, making plans together, sleeping together, sharing resources, building lives around each other, excluding other people from our relationship—and what do you call that, if not marriage?". And like Liz and Felipe, who sealed their relationship in a little private ceremony in a "little decaying hotel" in Knoxville, 2005, by exchanging a pair of simple gold rings and reading out private vows to each other, The Boyfriend and I, too, have embarked on a ring quest and returned with a set of personally engraved Cartier rings, with the intention of having our own little ceremony of our own devising when a suitable time arrives (though, knowing The Boyfriend well enough by now-- he the one who said "Wedding? Scary? No... What's scarier is walking into Tiffany's and Co.", and who subsequently earned a playful smack on the forearm from yours truly-- a "suitable time" may never come and we may just end up wearing our rings upon walking out from the Cartier store anyway). I swear, when the idea of ring hunting struck, I had not started reading Committed, and had no idea that someone like Aunty Liz had already cooked up this idea and served it in Knoxville 6 years ago. We have so much in common, I tell you, I'm really starting to think of a lunch place.
In all honesty, though, in the eyes of everyone else, we are not legally married, but we feel as though we've been a boring old married couple now. We have our own set of private monosyllabic mumbles in which we manage to carry quite decent conversations at times. We don't just finish each other's sentences, but say out loud what the other person is thinking even before they start saying what we were saying. The other day, we were reminiscing about life in high school, when the subject of identity numbers arose (each student had their own 5-digit ID etched on our school badges). A 5-digit number floated to my consciousness, prompting me to blurt it out just as he was quizzing me on his ID number with a smirk on his face. I swear I did not even know his ID number, until some weird and funky 5-digit ID flashed across my mind. This telepathic thing is eerie, I tell you. The next time I see some weird and funky digits again, I'm going to buy a lottery ticket. You'd never know.
My mother was 27 years old when she gave birth to me. The Boyfriend's mother was already giving birth to her second child when she was 27. Now I am fucking 27 and everyone my age is either married or engaged or popping out babies like it's 1959. Sure, I can jump on the bandwagon too and change my Facebook status to "married", but the point is, what is marriage nowadays when anyone who has a Facebook account can blithely alter their marital status? Where is the sanctity of matrimony, then?
Last week, while FaceTiming with my aunt and cousins, there was a non-negotiable urge to "Faster get married so that you can have kids!", to which I dismissed with my usual air of cursory disinterest with the retort "Who says you need to get married before having kids, anyway?". Yes, I do realise the cultural background (Asian) in which I was brought up, and in which tradition dictates that having a baby out of wedlock would carry disastrous social consequences. But, seriously, how much worse can having a baby be for two people-- not legally married-- who are already living together and behaving pretty much like a married couple anyway? It seems to me that one of the goals of marriage is procreation, and there just seems to be something quite fundamentally wrong with this concept that I have yet to reconcile with. I simply refuse to see marriage as a license to have babies. Moreover, I don't see marriage as a legal permission for two people to have sex so that they can fulfil their societal duties by creating an offspring. How often do we hear about the single, unattached individual (let us not affix any gender assumptions here) who earns a despicable reputation by "sleeping around", and how often do we hear praise about the couple whose "third baby is along the way, hooray!"?
To a certain extent, I can see why procreation matters. It's a biological and anthropological need to extend our legacy on earth. But I have to say, realistically speaking, we all know when we are ready to have kids (well, most of us do, anyway). At a stage where the couple's not ready to start a family, it doesn't matter whether they're legally married or not, they're still not going to have kids. Reading Liz's research on marriage and children, I cannot help but agree with her interpretation that when "sociologists say that 'marriage is extremely good for children,' what they really mean is that stability is extremely good for children." Children, as she puts it, need "constancy and familiarity". Marriage does encourage familial solidarity, but it cannot guarantee its consistency. How many children have been physically and psychologically scarred by their parents' marital breakdown? On the flipside, how many children thrived just as well when they're brought up by unmarried couples, single parents, relatives, grandparents, and sometimes even foster parents, when their environment is one of a calm and stable situation?
Look, I am acutely aware that this is probably my longest blog post ever-- and well done if you've managed this far, listening to yet another one of my rants about the frustrations of being gently coerced into getting hitched. Yes, I am 27 years old already (oh, don't I know!), and yes, I do realise I am perilously perched on the cusp of a critical, optimal period for childbearing. But I am only 27 years young. I want to travel. I want to see the world. I want to work outside of Australia for a period of time. If I were legally married, there will be pressure to have kids (hell, even at a stage where I'm not married, people are already dropping hints to have a baby, for fuck's sake). How can I possibly bring up a child in the most stable environment if I were uprooting from Australia to Papua New Guinea to South Africa? There's so much to learn. I cannot get married just yet. I don't think I can. It's not that I don't love The Boyfriend. It's a very different kind of love these days, one that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up after the dog. Liz would tell you that this is "real, sane, mature love" based on "affection and respect", and not just sole infatuation. But to link this kind of love with marriage is another thing. Marriage is when you bind your mutual love to your respective families as well. In her final chapter, Marriage and Ceremony, Liz concludes that marriage is "both a public and a private concern, with real-world consequences. While the intimate terms of our relationship would always belong solely to Felipe and me, it was important to remember that a small share of our marriage would always belong to our families as well." If you asked me-- a girl who values her freedom and who likes to think of herself as an "eccentric nonconformist", marriage is a wholesome, grotesquely unnerving affair while a wedding, let's just say, is ten times more nervewrecking.
Barcelona. Almost one year ago.
5 Durian(s) Thrown at Jun:
I enjoyed that rant, and the length of it. You should rant more.
As for the whole marriage thing, I guess when I was younger I never gave it much thought. I did the whole shotgun thing. It didn't make 4 years. It was a plain old registry office affair in front of less than four people.
I find that most people these days, including those brought up in conservative societies share similar opinions to you; although a lot of my friends wish to get married, there are just as many of them who abhor the idea of legal ties and other superficialities. And then there's the whole de facto thing. It's common in western cultures, but within Asian communities, de facto and children out of wedlock are too often sources of shock, horror, scandal. Sigh. We certainly are moving towards a more tolerant social mindset, but the rate of progress is so very slow...
"In all honesty, though, in the eyes of everyone else, we are not legally married, but we feel as though we've been a boring old married couple now... We don't just finish each other's sentences, but say out loud what the other person is thinking even before they start saying what we were saying."
There. There it is. That is enough, really. It's just the two of you, the two of us, the two of them, whoever these two persons are, that's everything.
*hugs*
nicoletta: hahaha really?? wow. there's a million other things that i could rant about, but, uh, i'll try not to take up 15 minutes of ur life again :P
i like that shotgun thing. in fact, the idea of getting hitched in front of less than 4 ppl sounds so much more negotiable than getting hitched in front of 400 ppl.
i don't know whether it's just the rebellious streak in me refusing to cave in to the demands of the (marriage) institution, or whether that's how most other ppl in my shoes feel- the ones who "abhor legal ties and other superficialities", as you so eloquently put it. whatever the case, at least u don't have to worry about these pressures anymore! :P
kenny: i know, that's EVERYTHING to US, but to THEM, it's not even A THING. why does matrimony have to be formalised?? can u tell me why, oh guru of life? sigh...
you can't please everyone, and if you even try, you'll end up being miserable. who cares what they think or say to you? just brush it off and say, uh-huh yah whatever. lol i'm sucha bad influence. :D :D do whatever you and hc feel is best for you guys. it's your life anyway, not the others'. ;)
agree with your rants mostly, though it doesn't unnerve me as much. prolly cuz i don't put so much thought into it (and prolly cuz i'm not there yet lol..can't get married to myself hahaha). to those who ask me when i'm finding a bf n getting married, i tell them i'm not gonna marry.. just gonna go to sperm bank n get some good quality ones n have a baby myself when i'm ready for it. freaked them out lol. so much fun! :D :D
taleanski: hehe u know wat will freak them out more? u know, ppl have a habit of asking in future tense, right? say, when u're single, they ask when u're getting a guy and stuff. when u're hooked up, they ask when u're getting hitched. when u get hitched, they will surely ask when is the baby due. so imma gonna wait till when they ask abt babies then tell them i'm infertile wtf that will freak the hell outta them and shut them up in awkward silence and will teach them never to ask me any more questions again.
then again, on the other hand, they may shut up for 2 seconds and suggest why dun i try ur method and go to the sperm bank instead?
sigh. like u said, there's no pleasing anyone.
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