Skip to main content

Holly's Marriage Manifesta

I asked my online, Sociology of Family students to discuss divorce rates in personal terms. Below is my example, which also happens to serve as my Marriage Manifesta.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

In 2016, my wife and I got married in a small ceremony in a fancy-shmance hotel. My wife is Jewish, and I’m an Atheist, so we compromised and had a rabbi officiate in a secular setting.

 I’m well-educated. I’ve read the statistics that say Atheists, liberal folks, and some groups (including two-women couples) who have cohabitated before marriage have higher rates of divorce. Frankly, those stats kind of shock me, since I would think liberal Atheists would be less wedded (ha ha!) to traditional forms of marriage and emphasize egalitarian relationships, but what do I know?
Just a newly married couple leading their
best man, a dog, and their maid of honor,
a cat, back down the aisle. 
Plus, there’s the queer factor. Minority stress, which is the strain of being members of a marginalized group, tends to shorten relationships among LGBT couples. This makes sense to me, especially for lesbians, who (spoiler alert) are two women, and women get paid less, so they’re likeliest to live in poverty, a big indicator of divorce.

 But, ya know, I don’t plan to divorce my wife. After living a life in the closet in my 20s, I am finally free to shout out my love and celebrate my being in its fullness. My wife and I are interfaith and come from different class backgrounds, which I know also raises the chances of divorce (because homogamy, baby, which means peeps tend to marry folks from the same backgrounds as them). But, hey, we share the same values, respect the heck out of our differences, and have a deep friendship that I think makes us gel beautifully.

 Don’t get me wrong. If folks want to divorce, go for it. I'm a big fan of not staying in soul-crushing situations. But I’m pretty sure my big, fat, queer marriage is here to stay.
Sources: Schaefer's Diversity in Families, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meet-catch-and-keep/201710/are-same-sex-or-heterosexual-relationships-more-stable

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poetry Slams, Not Body Slams

Sometimes, I style myself an intrepid explorer, an adventurer who boldly goes where no queer reader has gone before. Sometimes... I even download books from authors unknown to me.  Case in point: I recently finished a straight paranormal romance and started another, both by authors unknown to me. Woot! I want to impress you with my bravery and perseverance, but, well, I’m not sure I’m going to move beyond 14% of the second novel. After abstaining from straight romances for a while, I found myself startled to remember some straight paranormal romance sheroes find it perfectly acceptable for their manly love interests to perpetrate against their womanly selves kidnapping, sneering, condescension, and, my personal favorite, body slams against otherwise-innocuous walls. The worst part? Despite being (taking a deep breath) kidnapped, sneered at, condescended to, and slammed against walls, these sheroes just can’t help but notice how tautly their kidnappers’ pants hug their
1 comment
Read more

Letting Characters Speak

Imagine a scene in a book in which an inspector asks three different characters the same question:  “Were you there last night?”   As authors, our job is to make each character’s voice distinctive enough that adding “Jose said” or “Jae Lin replied” becomes all but redundant. Not just with words that reflect our characters’ personalities, education levels, ages, and regions, but with, to name a very few, some of their preferred clichés, consistent emotional timbres, and verbal rhythms.  I’m still, ahem, attempting to hone this authorial skill. I’m currently reading a book by an author who plumps out all his characters and manages, despite juggling a half-dozen protagonists, antagonists, and bit players, to give each one a rich enough personality to render them technicolor, relatable human beings. Damn him.  Not for the first time, it occurs to me to create a kind of character bank in which I list not only the usual traits like appearance and background but also some verbal qui
Post a Comment
Read more