This is my real entry. That last one was just an expletive.
8:30 a.m.
Firstly, thanks to all of you who answered my query about marriage. I asked it because it has come to my attention that a growing number of people out there, especially in Quebec where I am domiciled, are choosing to go the common-law route. What this means here is that after cohabiting for two years, the law considers you married for taxation purposes. If you own property jointly and have children, splitting up is just as complicated and messy as a regular divorce between married people. And yet people are doing it in droves, eschewing the vows, the fairy-tale wedding, the party, the presents. I don�t think that for most it is a conscious rejection of marriage. Couples move in together for whatever reason at the beginning, and in time don�t see what purpose a marriage certificate will serve, seeing as how the law has protected them anyway.
If you recall, shortly after the 9/11 crisis an airliner went down in Sweden, killing all the passengers and crew aboard. My neighbour�s daughter�s conjoint was on that plane, returning from a visit to Sweden where he and his family (they have two children) were about to move. They had just sold their house when he died tragically. I don�t know how it would be elsewhere, but this couple had never had a legal marriage. There was no problem. My neighbour�s daughter was treated as the widow and inherited the deceased�s assets. But that is here. This exemplifies why it is so important for homosexuals to have access to legal marriage (and even common-law, since it is available to opposite-sex couples). They must be protected in the same way that this woman was.
My mother worked for many years as a social worker for a children�s aid society. She watched many long-standing relationships disintegrate after the couple married. These were people who owned property, had children together, and had been living together out of wedlock for many years. As soon as they had that little piece of paper legally binding them as a family unit, the careful equilibrium of security versus freedom was upset and the unit could not stay together. My mother would get involved because often the children had to be brought into protection. She used to say jokingly: �Nothing ruins a good relationship like marriage.�
I know another couple, a married couple, who were highschool sweethearts, and planned their futures around each other, going to the same university for undergrad, and then the wife supporting the husband while he continued with grad school, eventually settling down where he could teach at a university and she could work in her chosen field. Although they have been married longer than us, they were still childless when we met them, Little Princess having been born a few months before. As I recall, they were extremely well organized. Everything was purchased with a credit card (and I mean everything) so that at the end of the month they could go over their accounts and plan out their budget. Perhaps they were paying off humongous student loans, I don�t know, but I found it to be pretty �anal�, if you know what I mean. Their first and only child was born on the same day as Buddy Boy. I remember visiting them with our two kids when Buddy Boy was two weeks old and they were amazed at the ease with which I was able to nurse my baby and generally handle him. I was experienced, I explained. But there was definite tension around their kid. The wife was resentful that her clothes did not fit the way they used to (she looked great to me) and that her sleep schedule was all screwed up and that her life was no longer her own. She was especially anxious because she and her husband no longer had adult conversations; everything centred around the last time Kevin was fed or changed.
Not really surprisingly, but rather sadly, the wife could not handle this disruption of her very organized and ordered life. She packed up her things and moved out of the house, leaving the baby with her husband, who, you might recall, was working a full-time job teaching at the local university. I don�t know for sure how long the separation endured, but eventually she got her head sorted out, rejoined her husband and son, and they became a proper family again, and have remained so. It�s telling, though, that they didn�t have any more children. So we could conclude from this story that nothing ruins a good relationship like adding a newborn.
There are a lot of stresses inherent in any relationship where two people are living together. The difference I believe between having that piece of paper and not is that with it, there is an onus on the couple to make the relationship work. This can result in a sense of responsibility, where the two really do make more of an effort, or the feeling of being �trapped� which can be the death knell of the marriage. In a relationship where no such �bond� exists, there is nothing to keep a couple together when the shit hits the fan except their own love and respect for each other, and their desire to remain together. Of course, a couple hopefully wouldn�t get married in the first place unless they really did desire to stay together the rest of their lives.
In other news, it�s still snowing.
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