Ursula: Hello, everyone, from the best month of the Western Hemisphere: October. I’m very pleased to say, as we come to the end of wedding season, that I got to go to TWO weddings this summer. One of them was local and super fun, and the other one was far away but VIRTUAL, and that was fun in an entirely different way. JD and I poured ourselves drinks, sat on the couch, and streamed the ceremony. Then when it was over, we got to enjoy the rest of the evening hanging out at home and saving probably thousands of dollars.
Listen. It was perfect. Can we make wedding livestreams a regular thing now? Because unless you and I are super close, or your wedding is near enough that I don’t have to pay for lodging, I would love to have the virtual option. I wish I’d done it for MY wedding for all the people who couldn't make it.
This issue is the first of what I hope will be a semi-regular feature: we’re interviewing another couple! I’ve been friends with Victoria and her partner Heather for a couple of years, and when I visited them recently, I was really touched by the way they talked about their relationship and what marriage means to them.
They’re both so insightful about what it means to be a queer couple thinking about marriage, especially having grown up in conservative families. I’ll let them take over:
Heather and Victoria, will you start off by introducing yourselves?
Heather: I’m 32 years old; I’m non-binary, AFAB, and use she/her pronouns. I grew up in small-town Michigan, went to college on the East Coast, moved back to my hometown after I graduated, then moved to Chicago four years ago. I was recently diagnosed as bipolar, which has been a big adjustment in my life and my relationship with Victoria. We have a cat named Lucy and currently spend a lot of time watching the wonderful wonderful television.
Victoria: I’m 31 and have settled on calling myself a lesbian. I grew up in Indiana, went to college in Utah, and moved to Chicago five years ago. I work as the office manager for a therapy practice and I volunteer at the Dill Pickle Food Co-op here in Logan Square. I like books, movies, planning meals and throwing parties. We do watch a lot of the golden age of television, but our other main hobby is hanging out in Chicago Parks and doing things outside.
Tell us about how you met.
Victoria: We met on Tinder! It was very straightforward. We were into each other immediately and neither of us remotely played hard to get. We had a wonderful season of puppy love and moved in together in October of 2019.
Heather: I love that we met on Tinder. I moved to Chicago after years of rural life and I was so excited to have this convenient, safe feeling way to meet queer people. I love meeting new people, so Tinder dating was a dream. I was a “Hey how are you so wanna get coffee?” kind of Tinder person.
We fell into our relationship with ease; there was almost never any back and forth about what was going on. We just sort of became girlfriends and then kept getting closer.
When you were growing up, did you envision yourself getting married one day? What did that mean to you?
Victoria: I grew up Mormon, and basically the entire religion is centered around getting married. Also, marriage is an ETERNAL COMMITMENT. So, yes, I suppose you could say I envisioned it...because in my youth group we very regularly made lists of the characteristics to look for in a future husband. We talked about it all the time. The youth group was basically like finishing school to create marriageable girls, or a 1950’s Home Economics class. Getting married was the pinnacle achievement in life and most of the women who were my church leaders had been married at 21-23.
I was dutiful about it. I could deal with the husband element, sort of; it was actually having kids I dreaded more. I used to wish I might turn out to be infertile, because that was basically the only socially acceptable way to be a childless Mormon woman. I didn’t realize I was gay until I had left Mormonism, when I was about 25. Being gay and Mormon was so outside of the realm of possibility I couldn’t really even think of it while I was in.
Heather: I grew up in a Christian house where the adults talked to kids about marriage a lot. Everyone was expected to get married. I was a first-born, straight-A-student, rule-follower type, so I tried really hard to think that it would happen for me. Not making it happen would make me a failure as an adult. I couldn’t figure out how to get a boy to dance with me at camp, so getting a boy to marry me felt impossible. I realize now how much my sexuality shaped that experience, but at the time I identified as a straight girl who just absolutely could not make it work.
What have your conversations with each other been like as far as talking about your future together, and whether or not to get married?
Victoria: Just a side story, we had one of our first big conversations about getting married while hiking at Antelope Island in Utah, where there is a bison herd. So our conversation about our future was interspersed with occasionally turning a corner and seeing a massive bison and being afraid for our lives. Lots of adrenaline.
Anyway, before meeting Heather I had mostly decided I probably wouldn’t get married and found that an empowering break with my Mormon upbringing—I’d refuse the thing they had always said I had to do.
But then there was just a moment in our relationship when we really wanted to start talking about our life together in the long term. And I wanted people in my life to meet her and understand what we were to each other. Our conversations with each other about it have mostly been really fun and romantic.
I plan our wedding all the time. Once I got very high and came up with a very elaborate version that would involve us hiring a lot of drag queens.
But I certainly had a lot of conversations with myself before we got to that point. I don’t think I care enough to not get married on principle—I’m told there are tax benefits, and I am not in a position to leave money on the table. But, I was compelled by some of Michael Warner’s arguments in The Trouble with Normal from 1999, which questioned marriage equality’s worthiness as a central political goal. Marriage privileges one certain type of relationship and provides material rewards for conforming to it. Especially having grown up in a rigid cult of compulsory heterosexuality, I am guarded against over-ascribing meaning and legitimacy to marriage. On the other hand, I was a Mormon teenager precisely when the church was spending thousands and organizing to pass Proposition 8 in California. Maybe it’s a BETTER fuck you to Mormonism to get gay married?
Heather: Reading our answers to the last question, it would make sense if the two of us didn’t want to get married. I have a lot of friends who feel that way. They were presented with a really grim vision of marriage as young people, and they don’t see a role for marriage in defining their adult relationships. Somehow, I’ve maintained a strong and hopeful imagination about marriage. I didn’t date much before meeting Victoria, though, so that imagination was never tied to a specific relationship.
With Victoria, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to marry her. I think it was 3 months or so into our dating when I sheepishly told a friend over brunch: “I kind of think we might get married?” I knew it was too early to talk about it, but I had a feeling like things were gonna last with Victoria. We had our first real conversation about it around 10 months into our relationship. Like Victoria said, we were in a very surreal environment: up on a tall hill, surrounded by the truly bizarre Salt Lake, regularly turning a corner to find the trail blocked by a dozen bison.
Our conversations about marriage have always been very fun and romantic. I feel like we are entirely doing it for ourselves, which makes it easy to talk about what we want. That being said, the pandemic has changed that a little. Before the pandemic, we were getting close to wanting to talk a little more concretely about a plan. Now I think we both feel pretty kicked on our asses and unsure about when we’ll be back in that mood again.
Ursula: Yes, let’s dig into that more. How has life during the pandemic affected your thoughts on commitment or the institution of marriage?
Victoria: Man, fuck the pandemic. I’m resentful--I wanted to get married when it felt like the beginning of our lives together and I feel like that isn’t possible anymore. But, perhaps I am more confident than ever that marriage has no bearing on the level of commitment we have to each other. The relationship is what it is, and yes, we’d like to have a ceremony to recognize that, but it won’t change how we understand ourselves as a couple.
Heather: The pandemic has changed everything about our plans to get married. We sometimes refer to the pandemic as our “dark engagement.” We were suddenly pushed into an intensely interdependent phase of our lives. We both lost our jobs and I had my first major manic episode, which led to my bipolar diagnosis. Going through that stuff together, it feels like already being married, except that we didn’t get to celebrate arriving at that place in our relationship.
Ursula: Heather, when we talked a few weeks ago, I was struck by the way you described the way straight people ask you about the loaded question of ~where your relationship is going~, and the expectations or pressure that they might put on you as a queer couple, intentionally or not. Can you talk about that?
Heather: Oh yeah, I’m happy to talk about it. I think I was referring to these weird secretive vibes I get from straight people when they ask me about different relationship milestones. They ask like, “Ooh, have you talked about getting married?” To me, it’s obvious that we’ve talked about it. We’ve been together for three years and we talk about our relationship. We’re not hiding anything for an exciting reveal. Like, “Guess what babe! I think I want to marry you. Surprise!”
Anyway I might be totally wrong, but sometimes I think that’s how straight people think about engagement and marriage. They think of it as like a fun mystery they will figure out eventually, instead of a normal topic of conversation.
Ursula: I think that is absolutely true! We have a misconception that as long as you’re in love, deciding to get married doesn’t need a lot of talking and considering and wondering. If anything, we’re almost discouraged from discussing marriage openly with our partners. The expectation is that you start dating a man and wait for him to propose. And that’s pretty much the reason why there are whole YouTube playlists devoted to failed marriage proposals. Imagine proposing to your partner without ever having had a conversation about it!
Heather and Victoria, thank you both so much for taking the time to talk with me. Let’s get together for more wine and cheese nights soon.
READERS--if you ever want to talk about your marriage (or partnership, or divorce, or whatever) with Matrimonium, hit us up! Kurt and I acknowledge that our own experiences of marriage only go so far, and we would love to have more perspectives on these hallowed pages. So pitch us your stories!