Nicole Seymour Seymour is a fourth-year
American literature and culture student. She loves reruns of
"90210" on FX and hates physical exertion. E-mail comments to
[email protected].
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About a week from today, Nov. 30, was supposed to be my wedding
day. My boyfriend and I had worked out the perfect plan: hit Vegas,
hit a couple of bars, and hit a chapel sometime around 2 a.m. (As
you can tell, we’re not the romantic types), but reality
eventually set in. As punk rock and spontaneous as it seemed, I
soon found out that getting married on a whim is a major
commitment, maybe even more major than a full-scale, long-planned
wedding.
It all started when my boyfriend was discussing plans for an
obscenely decadent and indulgent 21st birthday party in Las Vegas.
He said, “At the end of the night, I either want to be in
jail, in the hospital or dead.”
“Or married!” I jokingly chimed in, but a few
minutes later we were taken with the idea. What better way to thumb
our noses at the status quo, make a mockery of the great sham that
is the “institution” of marriage, and get a great
drunken story to tell our friends when we got home? We even worked
out a plan for the aftermath: as this wasn’t a serious idea,
we said we’d just stay married until the time that one of us
wanted to get married to another person, then we’d figure out
how to get divorced.
As I started to seriously research the idea, I found out that a
Vegas wedding is slightly more complicated than movies make it
seem, but it’s still ridiculously easy. First, you have to go
downtown to the county registrar’s to pick up your marriage
license, which costs $35, then head over to a chapel for the actual
ceremony ““ no drunken stumbling into a random Elvis-chapel in
the middle of the night, as I previously thought. But what makes it
so convenient is that you don’t have to take a blood test
(phew!) as you do in other states, and also, the registrar is open
24 hours a day on weekends and until 2 a.m. on weekdays.
I finally found the perfect wedding chapel: the Drive-Thru Vegas
Chapel, where we could get married for the low price of $70, all
without leaving our car. That brought the grand total for our
brilliant, subversive wedding plan to $105.
Most of our friends were very enthusiastic about the idea,
thinking it was characteristically bizarre and iconoclastic of us.
It would also enable me to echo my thought of marriage as an
arbitrary, sexist and heterosexist convention that doesn’t
deserve veneration or respect.
But that’s where the stickler was. An irate friend (the
only one) asked me why I would want to buy into such a convention
in the first place. “We’re flouting it by treating it
so casually,” I insisted. She still persisted, asking me what
was the point of getting married if we weren’t really in love
and weren’t even planning on moving in together. I protested
again, saying we were getting married for precisely the opposite
reasons that people usually do, thereby upsetting the whole
construct in the first place.
 Illustration by MICHAEL SHAW/Daily Bruin And that’s
when she hit me with some of the downsides: our tax status would
automatically make us non-dependents, simultaneously informing our
parents that we had gotten married. And there was more. My friend
put her co-worker on the phone to tell me that her brother had
gotten married on a whim, only to go through a hellacious,
emotional and expensive divorce. Expensive? The idea had never
crossed my mind. I had naively figured that if we didn’t have
any children, any assets to speak of, and if we agreed beforehand
that we would never want anything monetary or compensatory from the
other person, that divorce would be a snap. We’d file a
couple papers and tell the judge, “Hey, we were 21. It was a
joke. Divorce us, please.”
As the complications started to pile up, I also started to face
the fact that even if this was a joke, even if I don’t
believe in marriage, that doesn’t mean I’m not unfairly
taking advantage of a right that many people don’t have. In
fact, I had stated only a few months earlier that I didn’t
think straight people, at least straight people with consciences,
should get married as long as gay people couldn’t.
How could anyone, barring total homophobes, that is, flaunt that
in the faces of their gay friends, relatives, co-workers, etc.?
It’s basically like saying, “I’m happy to enjoy
the rights and privileges of marriage even though you can’t,
simply because you have a different sexual orientation.”
I thought, “Well, I’m not getting married “˜for
real,’ so it doesn’t really count. It’s not that
unfair.” But it is that unfair. Gay couples that have been
together for years cannot get married at all, while straight people
who have known each other for five minutes can get married
anytime.
Politicians and conservatives constantly harp on how marriage
needs “protection” and how letting gay people get
married would corrupt the traditional values associated with the
institution of marriage. (For example, see last March’s
hateful and homophobic Proposition 22, which was packaged as a
“Protection of Marriage” statute). But if anything is
corrupting or threatening this institution, it’s people like
my boyfriend and me, who treat it as a joke, or the people who get
married for financial reasons, or because they are pregnant or a
host of other non-traditional reasons.
Which is not to say that these are wrong by any means. I simply
believe that it is simplistic and ignorant to conceive of marriage
as an ideal, romantic convention. We’re no longer living in
the ’50s, we no longer believe homosexuality to be a mental
illness and we no longer ostracize people when they get
divorced.
Therefore, marriage laws need to reflect our reality and our
population ““ which includes gay people, straight people,
transgendered people, interracial couples, people who need tax
breaks and financial student aid, “illegal” immigrants,
etc. What individuals choose to do with their right to marry is up
to them ““ if they utilize it to help with some of those above
problems, or if they use it to symbolize their love for each
other.
Marriage, however, isn’t truly a right until everyone has
it. For now, it’s just an unequal privilege that many people
take advantage of, whether or not they treat it seriously.
So I guess my boyfriend will have to find another form of
drunken debauchery to commemorate his 21st birthday. Besides,
it’s not really debauchery to commit oneself to inevitable
divorce, a mound of fees, messy legalities and a whole lot of
bureaucracy. It’s actually kind of stupid. And so is availing
yourself to a whole host of benefits that gay people have no access
to, because even if you treat getting married like a goofy sitcom
act, it is still a mockery of the struggle for basic human
equality.