love out loud: marriage without marriage

I have been living with my housemate, Alice Planetoid, for almost 11 months now. In that time, I would estimate that I have asked her whether her parents are married, on average, once a fortnight, and yet have never managed to commit it to memory.

For the purposes of this article, however, I took special note of her response.

‘Hey AP, are your parents married?’
‘Yep.’
‘I don’t know why I always forget that.’
‘Yep they’re married. Common law, de facto, whatever.’
‘So…no?’

Usually the conversation ends around this point with AP simply shrugging her shoulders and me having learnt better than to argue with her world views (it’s not that she’s hostile, it’s that she’s, well, weird).

But on one particular occasion, I pressed the matter, pointing out that marriage typically denotes the union recognised by the law and/or Church, even though I don’t think any less of her parent’s relationship because they had elected not to tie this knot.

‘Well they consider themselves married, and I consider them married, they just don’t believe in the ceremony,’ Alice Planetoid responded, before characteristically shrugging.

As someone who writes, you might say I’m a touch obsessed with the meaning of words. They’re fundamental to language and thus, to communication. But AP had a point; if her family considers her parents to be married, then what difference does it make if they say that they are or aren’t in accordance with the legal definition? An increasing number of countries are changing their definitions of marriage to be inclusive of homosexual unions, so is this really any different?

Labels on relationships should really only ever be the concern of those involved. It only becomes a problem when the partners within the relationship have incongruent views on the matter.

Unlike AP’s parents who are happy to say they’re married without being ‘married’, I spent months wishing that Bono would just call me his girlfriend, rather than continuously explaining that I was, for all intents and purposes, but that he wasn’t going to call me as such. Although I better understand his reasons for it now, the difference (well, one of the many) between the label on my relationship and that of AP’s parents is that I wasn’t okay with it.

Whether a couple decides to call their relationship something only for the sake of others, or resists labels altogether, or makes one up that is unique to them, it shouldn’t really matter, as long as both (or all) people are happy with it.

And if anyone questions you, just shrug.