by Beau Burriola

SGN Contributing Writer

"Why should Gay people get married? Isn't it just a pathetic attempt to be as "normal" as straight people?"

Julien's thoughts on marriage were clearly well thought out ideas gathered from experience over time. Marriage, to him, is something Gay people do to pander to being normal; a sad attempt to fit into a mold that wasn't made for them, a farce, a sort of well-dressed, semi-moon-shaped peg that won't fit easily into a square hole. His question wasn’t easy to hear.

Even if I wasn't in a hurry to marry myself, I'd always appreciated the possibility of perhaps one day maybe being married. To me, marriage wasn't what Gay people did to pander as much as something we had to go out and demand as our equal right. I wasn't prepared entirely to give up the daydream, but it was too soon to ponder the question seriously for us anyway.

Both Julien and I had been very strong individuals, agreeing we weren't in a hurry to move in with one another or give up much of the comfortable separate lives we'd built. Our relationship was an unexpected exception to the starkly independent lives we both led, a slow step away from the shells failed relationships of people around us.

"If you needed that sort of thing as a next step," he continued, "we could go out and marry tomorrow." He made a joke about there always being one person who wanted to get married and another who was not at all happy about it; a joke which I let affect me more than I should have. I had the mental image of a couple at an altar with one of the groom’s fathers standing nearby with a shotgun to stop any quick escape. I didn't need that next step and, of course, we wouldn't go out and marry tomorrow or any day thereafter, if it were so painful.    

Our night had been going well up until this point - just another night along our nearly two-year relationship. The sudden phantom of a disagreement (or our usual "crisis moment" as Julien calls it) was an unwelcome party crasher. Like so many weighty questions, though, it demanded discussion as a matter of relationship decorum, and couldn't be easily laughed away. In an instant, our casual conversation about risotto and salmon morphed into a big discussion about marriage.

"I'd never drag anyone into getting married," I told him, and I meant it. If the only answer to the question was that we could do it “if I really needed to,” it wouldn’t happen. In fact, it was a pretty good reason not to ever marry. Relationships are about balance, and starting off at an imbalance when folks get married seems like a good recipe for disaster.

"Could you accept being with me and never being married?" he asked, hours later in the evening. It was a question I didn't expect and it forced me to take a deeper, long look at myself. I took some time to answer, pondering the consequences of my answer. A “no” could seem uncompromising and unfair, a new view on an old question. A “yes” seemed so final, as if I were waiving any right to future daydreaming on the matter. There didn't seem to be a safe answer.          

When people speak about love, it's often as if it were some cosmic glue that binds people together eternally, a panacea for bringing all relationship ills back to good. People are fond of describing it as an affliction, or as a sudden loss of personal control. In truth, however, it's a very deliberate act that often takes almost all the control we have to keep going.

For straight folks, the roadmap is pretty clear, and it points easily toward marriage. A whole world of Hallmark cards and wall posters plastered with dew-covered roses and big frilly poems, endless love stories in books, plays, and movies, and whole families full of good and bad examples spell out what should come next in a relationship.

For Gay people, however, the roadmap isn't so clear, and we're left to find our own way. Our path isn't so obvious, our communities seem more distracted, and our families don't seem to be full of many examples -- good or bad. So when we find our own path, all we really have to begin with is the love we fell into, and so we must see how sufficient love is both as a journey and a destination. Every decision thereafter, whether moving in together or just staying together another day, has to be based on only that love.

In that way, perhaps, not-married love can serve as a constant reminder from day to day that there is no better reason to stay together than the one we started with. Married or not, love is love is love.

Beau Burriola is a local writer with one eye on the journey and another on the destination. beaubrent@gmail.com