New Skin for an Old Ceremony

I’m looking at a little folded card, with a packet of sunflower seeds inside. On it is written: “The Bride & Groom have made a donation to the Irish Hospice Foundation in lieu of wedding favours”. It’s a nice touch – the wedding was in Tuscany, at the height of summer, and sunflower fields surround me as I write.

I never heard of wedding favours before. It is part of the sophisticated ritual of matrimony that has, so far, been beyond my direct experience. And yet, I’ve been getting myself all worked up recently about the right to marry. It’s not as if I’m waiting with a long-term lover, champing at the bit waiting for the law to change, fretting about the seating arrangements and who not to invite. It is an abstract argument for me. But I still feel strongly about it. I live in hope, however bizarre it seems now.

Rituals serve a purpose. They are a nightmare when they take over, like a juggernaut, when the symbolic purpose is drowned out in the fuss. They are even sadder when the emotional reason isn’t enough to sustain it: a funeral where no one really liked the person who died, or a big wedding which is put on and endured solely to please the parents.

The worst wedding I ever attended was a “Green Card” affair, maybe fifteen years ago, between a lesbian and a gay man; the inauthenticity of it was stomach-churning, with everyone posing for photos with fake smiles to try to fool the immigration people. Back then, that was the most common “gay marriage” around. At least three of my gay male friends have an Antipodean wife tucked away somewhere.

I was surprised at my discomfort that day – I had thought that I would relish the collective two fingers to authority that it symbolised. It is worth repeating that for many queers of my generation, the law made us criminals, and so respect for the law was never easy to muster. But that day in the registry office was the first time I realised that instead of mocking the institutions that excluded us, I wanted, deep down, for those institutions to include us. Me. The sense of wrongness that I felt then, is, I realise, similar to the sense that seems to disturb people who oppose gay marriage, whose stomach churns at the notion of two people of the same sex getting together.

What is truly insulting for gay people, when they are excluded from the institution of marriage, is the inference that the quality of love they have for each other is inferior. Whatever the patriarchal, property-based, tribal and religious origins of marriage, in the twenty-first century it is, at its core, a formal recognition of a loving relationship. When divorce was legalized in Ireland, it was finally acknowledged that emotions have priority: no amount of emotional deprivation or cruelty should be endured for the sake of the institution. Feelings are what matter, as unreliable as they may be.

There is a world of possibilities ahead of us when it comes to organizing a fairer way of structuring society, when it comes to the eradication of poverty, the protection and education of children, and a more meaningful and contented life. It seems to me that one of the most effective ways of improving the lot of children, ie of future generations, is to ensure that their parents, however poor or deprived, are given a thorough grounding in childhood psychology and the means to avoid repeating damaging patterns of care that have been passed down through the generations. That means a radical examination of heterosexuality, of the “Family”, a questioning of the funding we give young parents at the moment, without any commitment from them in return. After gay marriage is introduced, as it will be in the next ten years in Ireland, I envisage that the focus will switch to how the notion of “Family” itself has to change. (Which is perhaps why it is so firmly resisted by conservative Christians, who have a nasty habit of punishing children born outside their ideal model family unit.) And society will have a lot to learn from those same-sex married couples, whose children are rarely accidental, and who, if they are allowed to adopt, will have undergone the same stringent tests that every other couple does. No more, and no less.

That’s my hope, anyway. But, after all, that’s what marriage is all about: hope. Hope that love will be nourished and maintained and enriched over time, that life’s difficulties will be shared and made more comfortable with a committed partner. To those who say that marriage doesn’t matter, I say: go to a wedding when a couple truly love each other. Then, all the rituals come in to their own. They serve to be an expression of love, kindness and warmth, and an extension of one’s network of family and friends to bolster a couple through their lives.

I’ve been to two such weddings in the last ten years or so. One was a gay couple a few years ago, who had their wedding in their back garden in South London, having done the registry office thing earlier that week. Knee-high kids scampering around adults balancing canapés with drinks in their hands, big hats, music, sunshine, laughter. Their love remains as solid and heart-warming as ever.

The other, the wedding in Tuscany, was that of a little girl I first met when she was three, who now, age 26, has married the nicest possible man. Yes, I cried, bursting with pride when she entered the town hall. When it’s right, it’s right, and her joyous wedding was no more or less meaningful than that of my two friends in London, because what she and her husband created together, their own adaptation of that most ancient of rituals, was a natural, happy expression of what they feel for each other, and what we all wish we could feel for another.

If you believe that everyone has the right to marry, please come on the March for Marriage on August 9 in Dublin and say so. Gay or straight, married or single, bisexual or asexual, it doesn’t matter. It’s about equality. And hope.