Houston Southard

Stephanie Coontz - Marriage, A History

The last wedding I did was my cobbled take on Coontz's work. The bride did her thesis on gender discrimination so I thought it appropriate to monologue on marriage's tooth and nail ascension to gender equality. Its origin actually had nothing to do with god (unless you count laughable overlays between Hammurabi's Code and Deuteronomy). No, it started as bartering: my daughter for your land, but give her back if she's barren. The roman catholics only got in on the action in the 1500s decrying it legal only when blessed by a priest (celibacy irony!) but it was a step up because they were the first to preach marital monogamy and spousal respect.

Marriage didn't even have anything to do with romance, but once it did, it was a matrimonial power reversal as men learned how to court for a woman's hand. Only in the past century did states stop outlawing interracial marriage and spousal rape (legal until after I was born, and yes, at this point I'd started to lose the crowd).

But clearly this is all a bastardized valentine's day post. This week me and Melissa will have been together 4.5 years. As we shirk our wedding plans, we work from home and enjoy more than normal hallway sex (i.e., "fuck you," "no, fuck you"). I don't tell her enough, but she holds this relationship up as much as she holds me up. I silently resent her closed-off emotions from my emotionally-closed parapet in the sadly ironic way couples do. She just passed her Physician Associate boards, is rounding 30, isn't too bad on the eyes when she's not sniping glares, and I'm pretty sure is starting to come around, despite ignorant social pressure, that no diamond is coming (burn in hell De Beers).

Our marriage may include the contemporary elements of a ceremony (ordained by Jerry) and reception, but it'll be solidified via global odyssey as we travel to Vietnam and Scotland to mine ancestral metals that'll be smelted into identical rings.

The linchpin of the book/my speech/this post is that tradition is paradoxically untraditional. When you hear the naïve scoff at the quirky marriages of today, I encourage violence in response. After all, that's what valentine's day is all about. Happy V-day toots.