A Few Thoughts About Marriage
Nov. 3rd, 2008 12:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreI'd wanted to get married when I was a kid, but later on I grew to be more Libertarian, and felt that basically the piece of paper didn't matter. The commitment did.
It mattered to Richard, and after we had a fight about it, I realized that okay, fine, we could get married. He'd gotten married too frequently for my taste (I sometimes joke that I was wife N, where N >= 4, but that's not really a joke...), but what the hey.
Five months later, he died.
At that point, the default contract comes into effect, and there's things people do. The only other surviving adult family member was his 19-year-old son. At that point, I got a lot about what marriage does and doesn't accomplish. It's not just about kids, it's not just about health care choices, it's not just about family members. It's about what happens when things go horribly, horribly wrong.
Here's a story of where things went horribly wrong. The situation in California is better now than it was then, but I'm not going to be someone to tell![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tenacious_snail that her family wasn't real or valid, and that's what voting yes on 8 (in California) or 102 (in Arizona) or 2 (in Florida) would say. Vote no instead. Just a thought.
It mattered to Richard, and after we had a fight about it, I realized that okay, fine, we could get married. He'd gotten married too frequently for my taste (I sometimes joke that I was wife N, where N >= 4, but that's not really a joke...), but what the hey.
Five months later, he died.
At that point, the default contract comes into effect, and there's things people do. The only other surviving adult family member was his 19-year-old son. At that point, I got a lot about what marriage does and doesn't accomplish. It's not just about kids, it's not just about health care choices, it's not just about family members. It's about what happens when things go horribly, horribly wrong.
Here's a story of where things went horribly wrong. The situation in California is better now than it was then, but I'm not going to be someone to tell
tenacious_snail that her family wasn't real or valid, and that's what voting yes on 8 (in California) or 102 (in Arizona) or 2 (in Florida) would say. Vote no instead. Just a thought.