I was wondering the other day if, especially among women, we might soon see a lot of otherwise older, straight people take advantage of SSM. I can see this happening where people don’t really want to commit to the opposite sex but still want a partner in their lives as they get older. Maybe they have a dear friend, and want the kind of benefits that come from marriage. These people would be, of course, among the folks for whom there is no stigma to SSM. Or, maybe even younger, hipper women who want to try it out for awhile, knowing full well they can divorce if need be.
I still think straight men would have a harder time doing this, for cultural reasons, but I could see it in some rare cases for the same reason as above.
I put “not unusual” in the title because I didn’t want to say it would be common, but just not something that would be so unusual as to be considered odd.
Are there any known cases today that anyone is familiar with… maybe in Europe or Canada?
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about gay people marrying for convenience rather than love, I’m talking about straight people deciding SSM is the way to go since they aren’t into the dating/relationship scene and who might have a good friend of the same sex in a similar position.
Since we don’t currently require people who get married to give reasons (just that they satisfy a few basic conditions), I don’t know why what some might consider a bad reason to matter.
My grandfather’s brother-in-law was a stern, strict fundamentalist minister. His elder son left home in his teens before the Great Depression, being taken in by my grandfather, who worked for the New York Central Railroad and got him a job there. He continued to live with them until their deaths and stayed on, living with my aunt, his cousin. who never married, until he himself retired. After he first took ill with what eventually killed him, he rethought his situation. He and my aunt loved each other dearly in a brother-sister sort of way. But his railroad pension would expire with him as a single man. So to provide for her, he suggested they marry. And he lived one day longer than was needed to vest her as a surviving spouse under the pension plan. They were in their late 60s or barely 70 at the time.
Good reason to marry? The family unanimously agreed it was: to provide for the future of someone you love. That doesn’t have to mean romantic love; it just usually does.
I used a parallel of this on another board recently, showing how SSM did not HAVE yo mply homosexuality – consider a disabled woman getting a similar pension offering o marry the woman who has been her live-in caregiver for decades, to assure surviving-spouse benefits. They needn’t be lovers to be people who care about each other and what may happen after one passes on.
% It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone,
including your best friend, even though it’s strictly a bromance even though you’re technically married to him %
The thing is, once “same-sex marriage” and “opposite-sex marriage” are both legal, they won’t be separate entities. They’ll both just be “marriage.” So people of all genders will be allowed to marry, for any purpose whatsoever. As long as there’s no coercion involved, the reasons are nobody’s business. And their orientation will also be nobody’s business.
A friend of my mother’s was a widow. Her large flat was full of art, from the furniture (most of it hand-carved by her husband) to the tiniest little box. Her heirs were three nieces on his side and two on hers, none of which could tell a Dali from a Bosch.
Whenever she’d spoken with one of the nieces, she’d start talking about finding “a nice immigrant lady, one of those whose children are still in the old country” and marrying her. “She gets naturalized a lot faster, she’d appreciate this large flat, and she might even keep some of the furnishings because she liked them, rather than sell them as old wood :mad:”
The pastor would tell her that getting married to spite someone else isn’t the best of reasons, but he’d say it fighting a smile; the Radikal priest would laugh and tell her “go ahead!”; the more conservative priest would sputter and say “bah! Why would I say anything, you’ll do whatever you want!”. A friend who’s so conservative she walks backwards would start clucking like a hen. Everybody else thought it was a fine idea, specially for the immigrant lady.
She never did it; the nieces sold everything by the pound…
I agree. But I think that one advantage of SSM that people tend not to think of is that it will benefit straight people, too. Once we liberate marriage from the traditional definition, there might be benefits even beyond gay people. One of the arguments against SSM is that it shifts the focus of marriage from the procreative roll to the needs of the adults. To which I say, “Yeah!”. I mean, that train left the station decades ago.
I can’t wait for the day when I can marry gorillas as well as girls, giraffes as well as guy, and dozens and dozens of them at a time! It’s not a romance thing, just appeals to my sense of novelty.
This is actually a good reason to keep domestic partnerships even after full marriage equality has been passed. A lot of (mostly older) people have taken advantage of the domestic partnership laws in the states that have passed them. When two people are in a long-term friends/roommates situation it often makes sense for them to be able to make financial and medical decisions like spouses would, but they may not actually want to get married for cultural or religious reasons. Especially with widows or widowers who have survivor benefits that might lapse if they remarry.
That’s not totally true today for hetero marriages, I doubt it will be true for SSM either. INS, for example, routinely judges whether peoples marriages are “real” when a US citizen marrys someone from out of the country. You have to at least claim to be marrying for romantic reasons, doing so just to get a green card is considered fraud.
We have a hard enough time convincing real couples to marry. I don’t think anyone is really banging down the door to get married these days.
I’m sure the occasional faux marriage will take place, just as happens now. But I don’t think an actual committed non-sexual life partnership is necessarily “taking advantage”, nor so I think it will be common.