Matrimoni

In the wake of a hope for a situation in my country of origin, any post of personal nature has been substituted by reflections on identity. 
I miss the emotional writer. I write constantly, and I don't seem to be able to publish one final cut. 

This post is per request. I started it one year ago and found it on the drafts. I hope I can convey the same that made my friend laugh about it. She asked me to write something about it.

This post is inspired by a friend of mine, Sílvia, who found hilarious a serious point of view I made about getting married.

Situation: I was hosting a heterosexual couple in the attic upstairs. The attic has a toilet attached, but the space is so little that you can really hear and smell what the other is doing there. I let them know that the door is only for decoration, but they will maybe have to tell each other to leave when it's time to do nr 2. 
They look understanding and with a broad smile tell me that they have known each other for ages. 
- "In fact, we are getting married next month!" they say, silly smile to each other, broad eyes towards me. I am all for enthusiasm for a new love, but marriage is an optional transaction to register it, an inexplicable excitement to sign a contract when the love has been there all along...

So I asked them out of curiosity if there were so long together why they had the need to get married. I understand gays doing it to make a statement on equality, but, isn't being happily together enough? What do they expect to change?

Their smile faded. They said: "guess it is an important stepping stone in our relationship" I said "I guess in the US you still do make a big deal out of proms, dating, the whole engagement stuff and marrying and it is has a social weight". Should be good to keep a consumers' economy going, it generates revenue. I didn't add the latter, but I thought so, I have always thought that the nuclear family is a Judeochristian invention with marriage as a pillar to create an economy based on blood ties instead of promoting a widen community, a whanau. 
I guess it works because it is easier to trust the people you create. 

I then had a time to ponder on it. And had Sílvia to be my interlocutor. I never understood forced commitment. My longest relationship was strongly based on individual freedom and communal sharing. And I am not talking about open relationships, here. I feel polyamory is the future of loving, balanced relationships and living arrangements. I am able to love two people with the same intensity, but only able to go to bed with one. Maybe catholic upbringing, but my good poly friend Mama J told me that I shouldn't be ashamed of being monogamous and heterosexual. It is an option like any other. 

I often wonder if marrying comes from a heteropatriarcal need of control and hence keeping the women as a possession rather than a companion or from a realistic need of control from the matriarchy to make sure the male doesn't sleep around as a warrant to the security of potential offsprings in the economy system or, a rational approach from a more biological drive that says out loud you want to perpetuate the species. Or a combination of all, or none. A statement for sure, nevertheless.

I don't criticise the contract, I just don't understand the hype. I would use the contract at any point for visa reasons, tax rebates or to make a close person your chaperon, to give legal powers on my patrimony (patrimony-matrimony???). But then it would have to be a right for all, and not only for couples, ceremony optional. What surprises me is that the Judeochristian background of exclusivity by right of sex has prevailed. 

However. And that was the silver lining of my reflection to Sílvia, maybe for some people it is a ceremony of leaving behind past sufferings, leaving a past behind and starting afresh with a (temporary or permanent) suitable partner, like a public "mise en scène" of a change of life, a public presentation of the 2.0 version. The ceremony is usually not of my taste, but I totally understand the intention. 

I sometimes hit myself in the head to try to understand what is that drives people to lock themselves in 4 walls to a coordinated co-living in Zweisamkeit. I did suffer a dip when trying to embrace it, because it seems a goal on itself for others, like the ultimate goal. Frustrated because I don't understand the dynamics and it turns into a big question mark in my head in loop until it makes no sense.

As an example, it comes to mind the very first time a guy asked me out, after 5 years of hanging out as friends, days after our first kiss. I didn't understand what he meant when he said: "do you want to go out with me?" "we are neighbours, we see each other everyday, we walk to class together, we play football together we can talk for hours and we've kissed, so if I say yes, what changes? Do I have to hold your hand? Go out only with you now and then to a stroll or to the cinema? pretend to be jealous if you look at other girls? Or make extra time to kiss some more?" 
We actually ended up having a physical fight. I kicked him in the balls, he hunched, I remember how he ran to his parents' house cursing at me. End of our affair. 
It took a while until we talked to each other again. 

I have been popped the  marriage question twice, and the one question that came right after, each time, was: 
What for?
I loved the honesty of one of them: "I want that it becomes illegal for you to sleep with other men", we were in a car, I was driving, and I almost cause an accident. Note he had been sleeping around, and I knew it, so hence the shock. The other, on his very knees, didn't come up with such a good answer to "what for?", he actually thought he was doing me a favour in a quite literal attempt to magically convert me into a breeder, his own agenda, not mine. 
There was a third time, historically and histrionically in love for 10 years and reunited, when the prospect of getting a resident visa became unclear, he said: "if you can't get one, we marry and that's it". 
-"cool", I said. 
Two weeks later I was running away with all my possessions, as I saw I was getting to the core of a rotten apple. But that is another chapter of the progressive grey/progressive pink book. I still don't know what title works better.

Last Christmas I had a deep conversation with my sister about the unquestionable nature of tradition. We question it, it is a convention that has no logical explanation, but people follow like gospel. We thought we maybe we were programmed in a different way.