The Committment
You’ve been together with your boyfriend for ten years, you’ve raised a son together for six. The whole country is in a frenzy over gay marriage. Your mom wants you to marry, your boyfriend is opposed to it, and your son says “Ewww.” And you? You’re afraid of jinxing the good thing you’ve got going by taking part in a ceremony that, at the end of the day, means nothing where you live.
Welcome to Dan Savage’s world.
I just finished reading The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and my Family. I liked this book most of all because it is an entertaining read. Like a good relationship or a satisfying conversation, Savage strikes the right balance between light banter, Heartfelt Sharing, and Deep Topics. One of the passages I found most moving, for example, is the following:
Being single visits a kind of constant, low-intensity misery on a person—at least on a person who does not want to be single. Coming home to an empty house, not having anyone to confide in, facing illnesses on your own—being alone hurts, but people can get used to it. But being in a long-term relationship does not spare you from all that day-to-day pain. It just banks it. Every day I’m with Terry [Miller, Savage's partner], every day I’m not alone, a little misery gets put into a savings account, where interest is compounded hourly. The day Terry dies, all the pain I avoided when I was with him will be paid out all at once; I will suffer a windfall of misery. I imagine the pain would literally feel like being torn in two. Maybe that’s what people mean when they talk about “one flesh”?
Savage, if you did not know, is not only the editor of Seattle’s Stranger who last week confronted Washington’s Chief Justice over the gay marriage ruling, but he is also a sex-advice columnist. As such, he is not afraid to tackle taboo subjects that make people on both sides of the gay marriage debate uncomfortable. After dispensing with the well-known fallacy that marriage is all about the children and thus should be reserved for straight couples (huh?), he proceeds to talk about monogamy:
Straight couples do not have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage…. Married straight couples are presumed to be monogamous until proven otherwise, of course, and that assumption serves as a powerful inducement to be (or appear to be) monogamous.
By promoting the erroneous notion that monogamy defines marriage, and that all gay couples who want to marry want to be monogamous, supporters of gay marriage are creating and, in some cases, attempting to enforce a double standard of their own—one that opponents of gay marriage can poke holes in pretty easily. Just as supporters of gay marriage can produce gay and lesbian couples with children, opponents of gay marriage won’t have to search for long before they find nonmonogamous gay couples among the thousands who have wed in Canada and Massachusetts….
He goes on to cite James Dobson’s specious arguments about the supposed perniciousness of gay marriages, and continues:
Before I argue with Dobson, I would like to agree with him on one point: Dobson is absolutely correct when he says that children are naturally conservative creatures—but not in the modern sense of the term “conservative.”….Children are conservative inasmuch as they require stability in order to feel secure and therefore prefer things to stay the same. They need ritual and familiarity….
If we want to promote stable, lasting relationships—particularly for all those naturally conservative kids out there—we shouldn’t encourage people to have unrealistic expectations about sex, love, and desire.
As if on cue, the same week that I read The Committment, The New York Times published an article on gay men stuck in straight marriages. The stories there are just heartbreaking: in most cases, rather than participating in the consensual non-monogamy of the kind that Dan Savage discusses, the men are outright cheating on their wives because they cannot conceive of a life with an open adult emotional attachment to another man.
Perhaps it’s naïve at this point to expect America to have a sane discussion about same-sex marriage any time soon, but I think both sides would do well to read Savage’s book and understand what a gay family actually feels like—beyond the moralistic debates, the political posturing, and the hate-filled rhetoric.