Marriage for gays and lesbians

2013-12-16 21:40

I got inspired to write about marriage upon reading about Australian’s high court overturning the legalization of gay marriage.  Now I didn’t really pay much attention to it, as (selfishly) I am not an Australian and neither am I dating an Australian (not dating anyone at all) at the moment.   This particular decision, however, didn’t come as a big surprise for me.  The chances of a same-sex marriage being overturned over technicalities happened in several occasions and I am sure, hopefully, in time they will reword the constitution well enough so that straight people would no longer be threatened by the existence of us.

Anyways, that aside, this is actually not the reason why I blogged, I will leave the over discussion of politics and law to the more intelligent crowd, mediocre intelligent person like me is actually more interested in the idea of  ‘marriage’.  While our PLU brothers and sisters are fighting for the right to obtain a paper that stipulates equality and similarity to heterosexuals, I am left to ponder about why that paper is so important.  In many countries equality has already been achieved, (though sadly Asian countries have yet to come to their senses on this)  I do not dispute that idea of equality is so much important that having an institution that binds two person together.    But I digressed; I am here to talk about ‘marriage’ or the idea behind it.

I am old, ancient infact, to some of the younglings prowling in Fridae and Singapore’s club scene and coming from a typical Asian family my relatives (all 200 of them) will constantly asked if I have already found boyfriends, when will I get married etc.  I am sure many of you had to endure this.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am out to my immediate family, but with 200 relatives in this country, they are bound to give mom grief  had they knew about my affinity.  Hence I usually just kept quiet while uncles and aunties hovered over me and talking about marriage as though that should have been my life calling.  My parents are great people, extremely loving even to the day that my dad died.   I came from an unbroken home and by no means a dysfunctional family.   Marriage was never issue for me psychologically.   However, since I was at a young age of 17 (well ok, for the younglings out there, 17 was young ok???) I never believed in marriage or the paper that conveyed the ‘idea’ of love.   So the idea of a beautiful wedding dress and having tonnes of bridesmaid and friends yelling at each other and trying to get the groom (what do you call a lesbian groom.. lesroom.. hmmm? Thought to ponder) drunk.  That idea simply never appealed to me.

I could well blamed such cynicism on something atrocious that happened to me at that age, but now *cough* almost 20 years down the line, I have grown wiser (yeah yeah) and totally over that incident, but I still believed that when two people are truly in love with one another, they do not need an institution to qualify them.  They could well fight for equality (especially medical! We need medical because I am old and insipid), for churches to perform their commitment ceremony, rights to estates and even for the easiness to have children and have their children shared equal rights.  I simply do not understand why the importance is put on that piece of paper?  I don’t think we need the world’s approval (aka a piece of paper) or change our passport / IC to state that we are ‘married’ ?  Why is that even important?  Commitments are rare, the chances of two people being together forever are rare, the generic vow  of “till death do us part” is very rare, couples, straight or gay, break up all the time whether or not that are confined by a piece of paper and in some sadder cases even if they were confined by children.

 I, for one, would love to be in a relationship where I felt settled, where the two of us (despite obstacles from the law) would be committed to one another, to have estates in each other’s names, to have joint account, to have wills and insurance in each other’s names, to ensure the comfort of one another despite differences and tried to persevere through despite imperfections,  to have children despite the difficulty.  That… in its purest form… is love.  It is not marriage.