Maybe you shouldn’t be getting married until you have a job and insurance to support your spouse. It’s called being responsible. If I were the insurance companies I wouldn’t cover them. Life is expensive and if you can’t afford it you shouldn’t be trying to start a family; you’ll just end up leeching off of society like so many people already do.

—

Black and Gold commenting on Can Parents Cover Their Married Children?

I’m not really sure where so many people get the idea that its their business to decide when it is or isn’t ‘responsible’  for other people to have children or form partnerships (as well as the obvious other thing that is totally their business, who these partnerships can be formed between). I am not sure why the (state by state! states’ rights!) legal age of marriage needs the caveat of oh btw you need to have a job AND health insurance (btw this better not be from the government or your parents). With those specifications, when can anyone in their 20s right now possibly get hitched?

Married women in the U.S. do about 70 to 80 percent of the housework. When women marry, the number of hours they spend on housework increases; for men, it stays the same. When couples have children, her housework increases three times as much as his. Feminist women do less housework than non-feminist women; men married to feminist women do the same amount of housework as men married to non-feminist women.

—

Of Housework And Husbands [via]

Ugh.

if gay marriage is not the #1 concern of most queers, particularly those of us who are not white, affluent, and gender-normative, why have the mainstream gay orgs made this their priority and poured all of their resources into this single issue? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the right to marry is the last hurdle of the white affluent gay man to achieve parity with his privileged straight brethren, leaving the rest of us queers behind, still struggling?

— queerhapa commenting on Toward A More Colorful Queer Future [via]

We can combine incomes while reducing expenses such as food, child care, electricity, gas and water usage. Marriage may be bourgeois, but it’s also the greenest of all social structures. Michigan State ecologists estimate that the extra households created by divorce cost the nation 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and more than 600 billion gallons of water in a year. That’s a mighty big carbon footprint created in the name of solitude.

— Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For? [via]

I would venture that living in an extended family unit (as opposed to the nuclear family that this article implies) is probably more economical still. But, is that something that the Washington Post can really get behind?

The poor and the middle class are very different in the ways they have forsaken marriage. The poor are doing it by uncoupling parenthood from marriage, and the financially secure are doing it by blasting apart their unions if the principals aren’t having fun anymore.

— Is There Hope for the American Marriage? [via]

My feelings about marriage are very complicated. I got married (fairly) young, at least compared to most of the people I know, and feel like it has infinitely improve the stability and possibilities of both Ryan & my lives. I also think that’s possible without marriage. I am not sure if its marriage that is so beneficial, or if its the way that possibilities available make child-rearing, domesticity, etc, so much more difficult without the benefits/privileges provided to people who engage the in institution.

For the record, I still feel pretty guilty about my choice.

You’re married, not enslaved to one anothers lunacies, though actually that is often what marriage seems to be about.

— dancestoblue commenting on wedding etiquette

Capitalism depends on labor to create value, and the source of this labor is the individual. By privileging marriage and the family, capital is essentially purchasing the production of its most valuable raw material: workers… One innate aspect of capitalism is that it reduces organic social relationships to relationships based on economics, based on the creation and exchange of goods and resources.

— Pink and Black Attack #2 - FUCK THEIR MARRIAGE or, some thoughts on the counter-revolutionary nature of assimilationist politics and practice.

I think it is a mistake to presume that the social/economic ‘usefulness’ of marriage is something which is only (or even predominately) true under capitalism. while the idea of relationships built entirely on love/comradery/sexual attraction is attractive, i think it ignores the fact that human associations generally always have some sort of economic or social function. Can you even have an ‘organic social relationship’ unaffected by the larger society around you? I don’t think so, and kinship/relationships never exist in a vacuum.

Not to, you know, sound like a functionalist. also not to make it appear that I don’t think this critique is legitimate, because I do.

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual [or monogamous] institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships [and polygamy], can contribute to stable and humane societies.

— Statement on marriage by the AAA. [plsj’s additions in brackets.] [via]

I am not gay, but I have a vested interest in the outcome. We all have a vested interest. We are all human.

— Savage Love Letter of the Day

Remy Ma’s jailhouse nuptials were abuptly called off Monday when her rapper groom Papoose showed up with a most curious wedding present: a handcuff key.
“A wedding was scheduled today and a visitor to that wedding service was found to be in possession of jail contraband so the wedding was canceled,” a corrections official told the Daily News.
“The key that was found today easily opened handcuffs that we and other law enforcement officials use,” the official said.
The Brooklyn-born Papoose - real name Shamele Mackie - won’t be able to see his fiance now until November.
“The visitor was sanctioned by not being able to visit Rikers Island again for 6 months,” the official said. “He was asked to leave.

— Remy Ma’s wedding called off when hubby-to-be Papoose smuggles in key [via]