The Marriage Digression

I always hated it when newlyweds started talking about grown up they were, and how much marriage changes your life, and "So, Tom, when are YOU going to get married?" I thus made up my mind that I wasn't going to bore people with such talk. However, the nature of the Web is such that you can just back out of reading this file right now if you want, without being rude, so I don't feel so bad about taking up a few bytes of disk space with my own thoughts on marriage, and my own wedding, and all that nonsense.

I first met Crystal at Kinyoukai, the Japanese conversation club at the University of Alberta. She noticed that I always seemed to be sitting around campus doing nothing, or chatting with friends, rather than industriously studying somewhere. Well, I was in philosophy, you see, so as far as I was concerned, pondering the secrets of the universe or engaging in discourse with learned people WAS homework, but anyway, she figured that meant I had a lot of free time, so she thought I might be able to spend a little of it proofreading her papers for her. She's from Hong Kong, you see, and English is not her native language (although she speaks it better than a lot of native speakers I know).

So, anyway, I was all too happy to oblige, having done a fair amount of proofreading and editing for other people, and having found that I enjoyed it. Out of gratitude, she took to serving me lunch at her apartment on campus, where she and her roommates started teaching me to speak Cantonese. Maybe that bit about the road to a man's heart being through his stomach is true, because after a few months of this, we became boyfriend-and-girlfriend, as they say.

Well, in 1993, I got accepted to the graduate program in philosophy at McMaster University, and Crystal had just finished her BSc., and we had pretty much made up our minds that we wanted to stay together. But with her graduation, her student visa had expired, and I was going to be moving to Hamilton, so it seemed like a good idea to get ourselves legally hitched before heading off to Ontario. So, rather abruptly, we found a Commissioner of Marriages, booked an appointment for that week, and signed some papers. Sort of a busy day. I think we returned some library books later on, drove a friend to the airport, and that night I went to my usual Thursday night LRPS meeting. No big deal.

Now, that makes it sound like I don't have a lot of respect for the institution of marriage. That's partly true. I don't have a lot of reverence for the LEGAL institution of marriage. But marriage has at least three important dimensions, which we traditionally blur together into one. The legal dimension is just one, and it's really just a contract that creates certain legal rights and obligations. Personally, I think it would make a lot of sense if we just treated it as a domestic partnership contract and left it at that. We human beings often tend to live together in multi-person households, so I don't see anything wrong with allowing the sorts of rights and responsibilies conveyed in a legal marriage contract to apply to other couples, regardless of gender, age, familial relationship or sexual intimacy. Is it such a travesty against nature if two brothers happen to share a house, and opt to file a joint tax return, for instance? No, I don't think there's anything more to the legal institution of marriage than a set of laws that have nothing to do with what most people think of when they think of marriage, which is a relationship between two people, not between a couple of people and the State.

The second dimension of marriage is what I'm tempted to call the romantic one. That is, it's the commitment between two people to share their lives together, possibly to raise children, and so on. This state of affairs exists quite independent of any legal contract. If the legal marriage is the recognition of a couple by the State, then this aspect of marriage is recognition of the couple by the couple itself, or by God, if you're so inclined. No one else need be involved. This dimension existed the instant Crystal and I agreed to get married, because in our case we really were committed to the idea by that point. Other couples may be legally married for decades without every really being married in the sense I'm talking about here. But this is what marriage is at its deepest level, at least in my book. And it's also the most personal, so I'm not going to say any more about it here. Except to add that Crystal and I are very, very happy.

But there's yet another dimension to marriage which is extremely important, and which went somewhat unrecognised for a little while after Crystal and I signed the papers and moved to Hamilton together. That's the social dimension, the recognition of the couple by the community, by their friends and family. We human beings like to have some punctuating moment at which we can pronounce a milestone to have passed. That's why we hand out diplomas to formally recognise people as educated, and why we have baptisms and birthdays and funerals and, yes, weddings. So Crystal and I made plans to fly back home to Edmonton the very next summer for a big ceremony and party for our friends and relatives to get together and meet each other, many for the first time. It was a lot of fun, but I still miss my ponytail, which I had worn for all of my adult life until we ceremonially cut it off the night before the wedding party. (Crystal still has it, kept for posterity in a zip-lock bag.)

So. There's Tom's theory of marriage. Or at least a start at it. There's a lot more to say about it, but this is probably enough for now.

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