Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 11:58:48 -0500
From: mohr richard d <r-mohr@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>


                      Marriages without Wedding Bells

by Richard D. Mohr
(February 1995)

     Love and marriage may go together like a horse and carriage,
but weddings and marriages do not.

       We met -- Bob and I -- one May afternoon in 1978.  We were
cruising one of the continent's great sexual playgrounds -- the
ravines that make up Toronto's David Balfour Park.  Yes, we
exchanged bodily fluids before names.  But names exchanged, we
went to my place -- and had more sex.  Sex lead to dating.  And
before you knew it, nigh on to seventeen years of life and love
have logged for our journeyings together.

     Along the way, we have accumulated the standard debris of
daily domestic life in America -- sanitary district tax bills,
car insurance payments, property tax evaluation reassessment
challenges, a mortgage (now burnt), sets of dishes, toasters, a 
post hole digger, left over gallons of house paint, stuff like
that.  In the main, our life together is ordinary, not operatic. 
Perhaps sedimentation alone is the explanation and perhaps I'm
simply deluded, but our love feels ever more deep, robust,
substantial -- the sort of thing that might lead one to believe
in permanent non-material objects, traces of the divine,
whatever.  In any case, we consider ourselves married.   But it
has never crossed our minds to have a wedding, a marital
_ceremony_, or what the law calls a solemnization.

      To put things somewhat poetically, marriage is intimacy
given substance in the medium of everyday life, the day-to-day;
marriage is the fused intersection of love's sanctity and
necessity's demand.  In consequence, though, one can be married
without being wed.  A wedding is not needed to call a marriage
into being.  Indeed, until recently, by far the most usual form
of marriage in Western Civilization was common law marriage -- in
which there is no wedding ceremony, either religious or civil,
nor even a registering of the relationship with the government. 
Common law marriage continues to be legally recognized in one-
quarter of the states and has much to recommend it.

     In such marriages, the sacred valuing of love grows from
within the couple's relation and realizes itself over time
through little sacrifices in day-to-day existence.  The values,
loyalties, and intimacies contained in the relation are products
of the relation itself, not of social custom, expectation, or
demand -- they are truly the couple's own.  In this way, intimacy
takes on weight and shine, the ordinary becomes the vehicle of
the extraordinary, and the development of the marital relation
becomes a mirror reflecting eternity.

     In a common law arrangement, the marriage is at some point
culturally and legally acknowledged in retrospect as having
existed _all along_.  Remember that as a matter of law, the
standard requirement of living together seven years is
evidentiary and not constitutive of the relation as a marriage;
so, for example, a child born in the third year of a common law
marriage is legitimate from the moment of its birth, and need not
wait four years as mom and dad log seven years together.  The
marriage was there in substance all along.

     We know, though, from gay experience that many couples want
a wedding even if it's not needed to jump-start their marriage. 
If you read the burgeoning literature of gay weddings or simply
ask gay couples why they want marriage ceremonies as opposed just
to marriages, you get two standard responses.  One is that the
publicity of the event is key -- that the making of their love
public is what is important to the couple about the event.  But,
it should also be remembered that publicity is a requirement of
common law marriage.  The members of the couple must "hold
themselves forth" as married in order to be considered married at
law; if they live together in some other way, say, in secret or
leaving uncorrected a social belief that they are siblings, then
they are never married no matter how many years they live
together.  So publicity won't do as a rationale to distinguish
solemnized from non-solemnized marriages.

     The other explanation has to do with commitment; indeed
frequently gay couples call their solemnizations "commitment
ceremonies."  But a promise made in private is as morally binding
as one made in public.  What distinguishes these promises is
their enforcement mechanism.  A public promise invokes the threat
of shame as the chief means of its governance.  But at our stage
of civilization, such appeal to shame is both unseemly and
primitive _even_ for those couples who incorporate the pledge of
"forsaking all others" into their ceremonies.  Moreover, any
resort to social enforcement here is incompatible with marriage
understood as the _development_ of intimacy through the medium of
day-to-day living.  For this understanding of marriage calls for
choice and consent to be _continuously_ given, not given once and
for all.

     So what's left?   The gods.  If marriage is as I claim, then
marriage is worthy of blessing and sanctification, if anything
is.  And many gays call their wedding ceremonies "holy unions." 
But care needs to be taken that religion's baleful elements, of
which gays now chiefly bear the brunt, are not unconsciously
incorporated and ritualized in such ceremonies.  Hippies, you
see, were right about at least one thing.  They knew that
ceremonies are tricky, that ceremonies almost automatically
invoke and reconsecrate social norms rather than the value of
individuals and their intimacies.  As a check against this subtle
tide, hippie marital rites typically included texts of the
couple's own fashioning and a time for friends to give voice to
their distinctive ties to the couple and to bestow individualized
blessings.  Some of this reform has been taken up by yuppies, New
Agers, gay folk, and progressive denominations.  With such checks
in place, a ceremony invoking the gods can legitimately serve not
as what creates a marriage but as a sort of a bon voyage for the
marital couple where the hopes expressed are not merely for clear
skies and smooth sailing but for psychic or spiritual adventure.

     To date at least, Bob and I have not felt a need for gods.
And we certainly don't need another toaster.  So our marriage
courses on unwed -- shimmering, if plain, constant, and nice.

-30-