"Marriage is a way of formalizing and legalizing family ties. It cements certain obligations and offers certain protections that – depending on where you live, and depending on who you love – cannot be easily acquired any other way."
"Do my fellow straight people understand what can happen when these protections are not available? Do you understand how quickly you could be erased from someone’s life by these “mere” formalities, if your partner’s feelings about you change someday, or if they get sick or die and the whims/prejudices/greed of their family of origin or the state decide that you don’t matter, that your relationship isn’t “real” enough?"
But especially this one: "For the “marriage isn’t a big deal, it’s just a piece of paper” crowd, my usual question is: If it’s not a big deal to you, and it is a big deal to your partner, why not go through with this “trivial,” “silly,” “meaningless” “piece of paper” to make the person you love happy? Why is the person who thinks it’s important the one who has to compromise?
In the sputtering that follows, usually what we discover is that it IS a pretty fucking big deal (and that’s why they don’t want to do it)."
When I was dealing with the Greek and he kept making me feel like my desire to be married was stupid and some sort of societal pressure instead of something I actually wanted for me, I remember trying to point out that, if marriage was so pointless, why was he fighting so hard for LGBT marital rights? I pointed out that I wanted to get married for many of the same protections that this movement was fighting for. Captain Awkward put it so much better than any of my frustrated arguments ever could. And she's right, this is a major incompatibility between people. It's fine if someone doesn't want to get married, but it's not wrong or stupid if another person does. As she says in that last part, why is it always the person who thinks it is important the one who has to compromise and the one who gets shamed for "giving up a good thing" if they decide marriage is more important than a current relationship.
In the end, I did get married, and it was well worth it.
