On Being and Having a Wife
Bonnie J. Clark
July 13, 2013
On the eve of Independence Day, I woke up next to a woman who was not just my beloved, but also my wife. That I, too, was hers was evident by my new wedding ring and our two bouquets, slightly bruised from being tossed the previous day. My many emotions that morning—joy, love, victory, relief—were joined by a bit of the uncanny. Could we, after nearly 19 years as a couple, really be legally married? Did I really have a wife? Was I really someone else’s?
The short timeline to that morning began five days earlier in a magazine shop on Market Street in San Francisco. We were freshly off the plane from Colorado for a short trip to visit friends in California. As we browsed the periodicals, the radio crackled the news: they had resumed gay marriages at City Hall. We couldn’t quite believe what we heard. California’s Proposition 8 (along with the Defense of Marriage Act) had been overturned only two days earlier. Most everyone had predicted a 25 day wait, typical procedure for a Supreme Court ruling. But sometimes the wheels of justice turn quickly, greased by the work of many motivated individuals. Later that evening, a friend who had himself worked on the case filled us in on some of the legal details. These marriages, he reassured us over a celebratory cocktail, were going to stick.
The next morning I woke up at first light, too excited to go back to sleep. Why not turn our vacation into a wedding?, I asked my sleepy, defenseless partner. We had everything we needed: each other, a good friend to marry us and others to witness, and most importantly an open door for full, legal marriage. So, despite the fact that we had spent much of the flight the day before sketching out plans for an elopement to New York, we decided to wed on the Berkeley campus. It was a place that we, as Ph.D. students, had come to love and feel at home. The next three days’ whirlwind of planning, shopping, and logistics only added to the romance. But it wasn’t ours alone. Everywhere we went we encountered palpable excitement. Scores of couples and their supporters filled the Sonoma County Clerk’s Office the day we obtained our marriage license. A gallery of photographs from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat captures the spirit of that day, a historic moment when love and civil liberties were together victorious (http://www.pressdemocrat.com/gallery/gallery/701009998.html.)
But the longer timeline, as is likely true for many other couples who married that week, is significantly more complicated. When marriage equality nudged its way to the front of “the gay agenda,” I was ambivalent to say the least. Girls who grow up in Utah, as I did, feel the pressure to marry early. By my senior year of high school, bridal magazines were passed around the back of classrooms like pornography. My dreams were of college, not of hope chests or bridesmaids. Quite frankly I came out as a feminist long before I did as a lesbian. Add in that I am an anthropologist, and you can imagine my failure to see marriage as a clearly beneficent institution. The Titanic seemed to me a proper metaphor for marriage: Queers clamored to be let on board, somehow blind to the fact the vessel was visibly foundering.
An important turning point in my attitude came at a Denver rally in 2003. While celebrating a new city ordinance recognizing domestic partnerships, the crowd was reminded of the work ahead. The speaker, a straight ally and an African-American woman, told us to listen closely as she read from the majority decision in Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court decision that overturned anti-miscegenation laws. These are the lines she read:
The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival.
At that moment I knew she was right. A full citizen, a “free man,” gets to marry whom they choose. Until I had that freedom, my full personhood was denied. A more quotidian turning point came when my partner and I were struggling to keep up our household on my junior professor salary while she completed her dissertation. At tax time I compared my actual tax bill to what I would have paid had we been able to file jointly. Putting a dollar figure on discrimination only made it just that much more obvious.
So by the time DOMA and Prop 8 fell, I was ready. My commitment to my partner has never been in doubt, but coming to terms with the social meaning of marriage and especially expectations around “wifedom” has only begun. Will I use the term in conversation? It avoids the ambiguity of “partner” and the juvenile connotations of “girlfriend.” I like its political punch, but the few times I’ve tried it out in serious conversation, it’s tripped me up. Among friends its utterance is typically followed by something like, “Holy Shit! I have a wife.” When my partner calls me her wife, it doesn’t carry the baggage I expected, at least so far. It feels sweet, a term I am lucky to claim.
And I will continue to claim it although, technically speaking, in Colorado I don’t have a wife. Our California marriage will here, at least for now, be recognized as a civil union. But as my sister told me, “No, you are married. More married than those idiots on the Bachelorette.”
Bonnie J. Clark received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in 2003. She remains wary of the wedding industry.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 