Recommitment Ceremony
I finally finished Dan Savage's The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family, and I have to say that -- even given my caveat that it was probably too early to judge -- my previous criticism based on the first couple of chapters was rash and unduly harsh. The book did indeed get much, much better. I owe the author an apology. Or at least you. I even got varklempt at the end when -- oh, I can't say what happens. You'll have to read it.
I think I was initially turned off by the cutesiness of the passages about his kid, which make up much of the beginning pages. (I guess then I probably won't bother reading his earlier book The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant.)
The Commitment settles into some really powerful, eloquent -- and yes, funny -- counterarguments to the anti-gay-marriage Nazis. Savage also astutely dissects the way we -- both gay and straight -- talk about relationships (including hypocrisy on both sides). I liked the following passage, in which he's discussing his grandparents' contentious marriage -- a union that, among other things, drove his grandmother to drink:
"The instant my grandmother died, her marriage became a success.
"Death parted my grandparents, not divorce, and death is the sole measure of a successful marriage. When a marriage ends in divorce, we say that it's failed. The marriage was a failure. Why? Because both parties got out alive. It doesn't matter if the parting is amicable, it doesn't matter if the exes are happier apart, it doesn't matter if two happy marriages take the place of one unhappy marriage. A marriage that ends in divorce failed. Only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney's is a success.
"It's a rather perverse measure of success."
I think I was initially turned off by the cutesiness of the passages about his kid, which make up much of the beginning pages. (I guess then I probably won't bother reading his earlier book The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant.)
The Commitment settles into some really powerful, eloquent -- and yes, funny -- counterarguments to the anti-gay-marriage Nazis. Savage also astutely dissects the way we -- both gay and straight -- talk about relationships (including hypocrisy on both sides). I liked the following passage, in which he's discussing his grandparents' contentious marriage -- a union that, among other things, drove his grandmother to drink:
"The instant my grandmother died, her marriage became a success.
"Death parted my grandparents, not divorce, and death is the sole measure of a successful marriage. When a marriage ends in divorce, we say that it's failed. The marriage was a failure. Why? Because both parties got out alive. It doesn't matter if the parting is amicable, it doesn't matter if the exes are happier apart, it doesn't matter if two happy marriages take the place of one unhappy marriage. A marriage that ends in divorce failed. Only a marriage that ends with someone in the cooler down at Maloney's is a success.
"It's a rather perverse measure of success."
posted by Billy at 12:20 PM
2 Comments:
That passage about divorce is very thought provoking for me.
I had a totally amicable divorce about 25 years ago. We had our arms around each other at the divorce hearing despite the fact that #$#@@%@ he would marry a week later was allegedly pregnant. We had been married over 10 years.
My current in-laws on the other hand have been married well over 40 years and they don't seem to like each other at all and bicker on a constant basis. She doesn't permit him to even hold her hand. If one of them dies, their marriage was a success. Mine was a failure.
I guess that is because marriage is supposed to last a lifetime and society doesn't give us any practice shots even if the practice shot is pretty close to the mark.
Check out Laura Kipnis's take on marriage/monogamy, etc. She's a prof from Northwestern who pokes holes/set fire to, and otherwise totally trashes the whole conceit of one mate for life, blah blah blah.
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