Back when legalizing same-sex marriage started gaining traction, I noted that its supporters – at least, many of its most vocal ones – seemed to have a pollyannish view of same-sex couples. Because their love was (officially) denied, it was so much more real than unions of straight people. “I wish I had gay parents; they’d be better than my parents!”, said not a few overpraised teenagers, to the barking-seal-like praise of camera-toting activists who, I suspect mostly, had never raised teenagers, and know they would say the same thing about satanist, Nazi or Yankee fan parents, if that would piss their real, boring, imperfect hetero parents off enough.
In the heady days when same-sex marriage was all about activism, gay couples were perfect couples, in the public imagination.
I wondered, out loud (figuratively and literally), what would happen when it turned out that gay couples are only human? And (admittedly, somewhat cynically) that the real beneficiaries would be divorce lawyers?
Because as it turns out, they are.
The whole piece is worth a read, by the way. I have friends and colleagues who are in same sex marriages, and I certainly don’t wish them any of the misery divorce brings.
And I have to wonder – how many couples got married for the same reasons those teenagers up above threw their parents under the bus – to flip a bird at all the squares?
There are lots of dumb reasons to get married, no matter who you’re marrying. That’s one of them.
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