Disclaimer for close friends and family: This newsletter will get pretty personal. If you don’t want to know THAT much about the most intimate relationships in our lives, consider this fair warning!
Hi, friends! Welcome to our newsletter. Kurt and I have been friends for many years now, and a while back we were in a frenzy texting each other about the couples on Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, the Netflix show where organizational wizard Marie Kondo helps people declutter their homes. We were really frustrated with the way some of the couples treated each other—regardless of whether it was scripted or genuine—and as married people ourselves, we had a lot to say about the way people play out their roles when they get married. Thus, the idea for this newsletter was born.
Kurt: I remember the one husband used the phrase “happy wife, happy life” and we were both doing our own impression of Madeline Kahn in Clue. You know the one.
Ursula: Yes! He kept saying it like he was just resigned to whatever his wife wanted and it made us so mad—and we have that whole topic saved for a later issue, actually, so as much as I want to talk about it NOW, I’m going to take a few deep breaths and then get back to my introduction.
Ursula, 32 (she/her); married for 5 years to JD, 37 (he/him)
Ahem. Here we go. When I got engaged, at age 26 (a tiny baby!), I was still very much figuring myself out as an individual. Figuring out who I was going to be as a married woman was a fascinating and terrifying layer to add to the mix. Let’s be clear: I’m a cis, straight, white lady married to a cis white man. The construct of Western marriage as we know it was made for couples like JD and me; as much as I might have wished otherwise, we weren’t doing anything rebellious or unique by getting married. We had a fairly straightforward wedding, with the white dress and the tiered cake and all that (and it was awesome!). But I was adamant that my new husband and I not fall into the cookie-cutter roles that society had laid out so neatly for both of us. (It was very much an “I’m not a regular bride. I’m a cool bride” thing.) I wanted to get married for the right reasons—whatever those were—and not just because it seemed like the logical next step in my life.
There was a lot I had to learn when I was preparing to get married, and so much more that I’ve had to wrestle with since then. Would I take my husband’s name? (Hell no.) Would I be comfortable calling myself a wife? (Surprisingly, yes.) Would I be okay giving up the possibility of having children, which was a dealbreaker for JD? (It’s complicated.)
One thing I’ve learned in my five years as ~A WIFE~ is that you can live out your marriage in so many different ways, but I think a lot of people just use whatever models they’ve seen and copy that, without taking the time to explore what they really want. And besides that, I find marriage in all its forms endlessly fascinating. Why people choose it—or don’t—and how they perform it. The ways marriage has been bent and adapted to fit the lives of people it was never meant to serve, but who have managed to make it a part of modern life anyway. The fact that marriage is an outdated, narrow-minded, patriarchal institution, but even the weirdos and progressives and feminists—like me—dream of it and plan for it and demand it, for all sorts of reasons or perhaps for none at all.
Kurt: This absolutely reminds me of Liz Lemon’s wedding on 30 Rock. A touchstone for my own marriage journey.
Ursula: YES! Tell us about it.
Kurt: Liz and Criss (lol) decide to get married primarily because it would make their adoption process easier. Liz doesn’t want a marriage ceremony because it’s “a giant industry that preys on gender stereotypes.” Wow, that’s essentially the basis for this newsletter. Like I said, it should be easy, but Liz realizes that even as awful and commercialized the wedding industrial complex can be, she finds she wants to have a celebration. She has a crisis of conscience, and she realizes it’s okay to want her wedding day to be special. Their wedding is silly and irreverent and beautiful, and those are the things I strove for in my own relationship.
This episode resonated with me so much. I had railed against the very idea of committing to one person for the rest of my life, and I was exhausted just thinking about the tradition of marriage. But then KABLAM I fell in love (ugh, gross) and had a very similar crisis. Was I going to sacrifice my ideals and succumb to wedded bliss? As you will see from my intro, not really!
Kurt, 40 (he/him/they/them); married for 3 years to Gil, 36 (he/him)
For most of my life, I had zero aspirations to get married. Part of that was because until fairly recently, LGBTQ marriage was not a thing. The option was off the table for so long that it seemed wholly unrealistic. But a larger part was that I just didn’t see the point in it. Marriage seemed…boring, for lack of a better term. It was something all my straight friends did with varying degrees of success. And I had had my fill of attending straight weddings to last a lifetime. Add some non-monogamy to the mix and that alone should have been enough to keep me far far away from matrimony land. My relationships before Gil ran the gamut, from casual flings, to one that was long term and (mostly) monogamous. But the idea of committing to one person didn’t appeal to me. At all.
It wasn’t until I moved to Chicago, and fell in looooove with Gil, that my opinions began to change. We got engaged almost like happenstance. There was no fancy candlelit dinner, no getting down on one knee, absolutely no ring. Just a sweet, silly conversation that led to us getting married a year later. We were monogamous for a while, but we decided to open up our relationship a few years ago. This wasn’t something we went into lightly, but it felt right for us. Everything about our relationship has been pretty non-traditional (at least in certain circles). And it puts a lot of the traditions and stereotypes about marriage into sharper focus, and how much I despise almost all of it. But! Here I am, a wedded queer in a polyamorous relationship doing my best to not feel like a total sellout to my internal narrative.
Which is why I’m so interested in exploring what it means to be a married queer person in 2020, and how does marriage fit into polyamorous—let alone LGBTQ—relationships. And what does that even look like? It’s been a fascinating, joyful, frustrating, infuriating, and ultimately worthwhile journey for us. I’m looking forward to unpacking some of the lesser-understood elements of polyamory and see what we can all learn from it.
I’m also fascinated by representations of marriage in pop culture. And how polyamorous or non-monogamous characters are routinely cast in an unflattering light. They’re the “free spirit” characters that ultimately never get the protagonist in the end. There’s a constant message that marriage is the end goal, like it’s the final level in life, when in some regards it’s just the beginning. The stories usually end with the wedding. That’s all, folks! There’s your happy ending. Where do those stories go after? What would we learn from these stories if we knew what happened after the rice was thrown?
Ursula: That makes me think of Into The Woods, where the second act is all about what happens after “happily ever after.” I’m actually not a fan of that musical—the “getting what you want in life actually sucks!” messaging feels condescending to me—but it’s so true that often, it’s the post-wedding life where the story gets interesting.
Anyway, I’m so glad we’re finally making this project happen and I can’t wait to talk all things marriage with you! I promise not to go on too many rants. Maybe.
Kurt: I won’t stop you from ranting, and I couldn’t agree more! It only took us, what, a year or two to get this launched? But it’s finally happening! We’ll try to keep our posts to a monthly schedule, and we’re looking forward to doing some deep dives into heavy-ish topics like marriage counseling and the world of polyamory, as well as more lighthearted subjects like our favorite couples in pop culture and also in real life (Meghan and Harry come to mind as of late).
Ursula: Aren’t they the best? I look forward to The Crown covering their story in 2029 or so.
Kurt: Bold of you to assume the world will still exist by then, but I’ll go along with it.
Ursula: I HAVE HOPE!
Ursula Wheeler is a writer and editor living in Chicago. Her work has appeared on Offbeat Bride, the Useless Critic, Film Daily, and a number of lapsed personal blogs. She has a BA in English from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and an MA in Writing & Publishing from DePaul University.
Kurt Conley is a writer and graphic designer living in Chicago. They received a BA in English and a BFA in Graphic Design from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in 2011, and received an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. In addition to writing, they create logos and design language for the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives.