Why would you be proud to be married?

[Grennie]

I am just trying to understand this from a feminist perspective. Why would a woman under patriarchy be proud to be married?

Yep that's tight Kilmur they are all aged spinsters breeding cats in the country!

I don't see why having a pleasant couple-relationship is anything to be proud of, because having a good one (not one where you subjugate yourself to keep your Man happy and tell anyone who will listen how wonderful he is) is a matter of luck more than anything else. If you have a good relationship, it's not just because you are smarter or better than other women who are in shit relationships - or single. It just so happens that you met a decent man when you and he were at a stage in your lives that you were ready to engage in a couple-relationship, and both of you remain decent people who are reasonably attracted to one another.

That is statistically the case dad.

I know the statistics Grennie, but that's not what I asked. I suppose the answer to my question is that, in your personal case, you feel your relationship does not fit the stats or you feel long term commitment is not simply about being the most happy you can imagine yourself being. Either way I think your original question:

I am just trying to understand this from a feminist perspective. Why would a woman under patriarchy be proud to be married?

-has a lot to do with the UK wimping out with civil partnerships for gay couples instead of recognising the relationships as 'marriage'. Were this feminist board populated with Canadians (who went the civil partnership route themselves but had that odd half-way house concept crushed by law into 'real' marriage) perhaps their thought would regard the concept of marriage as less inherently patriarchal? Fixing gay marriage in law IMO is the proof that a society can see past labels of religious pride and false morality to the inherent worth of a committed human relationship that transcends gender boundaries. In time western society may fully evolve to that thinking.

As for taking pride in something, people can be proud of the oddest of things. I think many parents confront that reality head on when they encounter their kids so incredibly chuffed of their pooping skills. I don’t really much care about people being proud of this or that unless I think what they take pride in is evil, and its the nature of a particular marriage that makes it good or evil, not marriage itself.

After the seven year honeymoon a marriage/relationship tends to blend together in peoples minds anyway and separating the two dribbles down into piddling semantics over what colour they think the same fence is. Perhaps after that honeymoon period if a woman is still proud purely of the 'marriage certificate' (so to speak) she is trying to compensate for either a bad relationship within the marriage or some lack of self esteem in herself.

FamiliesShareGerms - I don't think anyone has said that you shouldn't be proud of being married. It's not something feminists (or women in general) should be ashamed of it or shouldn't be happily married without being traitors to the cause.

It's just that for me, the act of getting married is much like joining the local library. Hardly a great achievement and anyone can do it. So I puzzle over why others might be proud of it. Not that I think you're wrong to be proud, it's just that personally, I don't understand it.

annie you say you think marriage isn't a great achievement and anyone can do it - it seems to me you don't think much of it - why did you get married? surely you wouldn't sell your feminist identity/beliefs down the river for some legal documentation?

seems to me a lot of feminists are against the idea of marriage because of what it meant historically and that it was/is an invention to benefit men at the expense of woman (this is what people no this thread have said) - why are so many of you married if you feel this? why don't you free yourself from this invention if you don't agree with it? your actions seem to go completely against your beliefs

i don't pretend to fully understand feminism, the detail of it and what i read on here is pretty new to me - ive always had a negative view of it when it has been mentioned - the more I read on here the more i believe people who say they are feminists seem to compromise on their beliefs in RL all the time - why would you do that? don't you think you are selling yourself short? i guess i have a negative view of it because people seem to say one thing but do something completely different and don't have any conviction to stand behind their beliefs but they are happy to tell other people to stand behind their beliefs i.e. do as I say not as I do.

peggy, those are fair questions.

Why did I get married? In short, I needed a visa to stay in DH's country and had run out of other options!

I think you misunderstand me though. I'm not against marriage. I love my DH, I was very happy for us to make a public proclamation of our intention to be together for as long as we stand each other, to celebrate that with family and friends and to have a very fine party! I enjoy the legal protection marriage affords both me and my DH. As a concept, in modern terms, I thoroughly approve of it. In the same way that I approve of people joining the library!

I just don't see it as a source of pride, is all, just a practicality for defining a long-term relationship.

And as for why feminists compromise their belief - while ideals are all very lofty and good, and in an ideal world the legal joining of a man, a women and all their worldly goods wouldn't have a shadow of an oppressive history behind it, we live in the real world. Marriage offers women legal protection.

youngblowfish explained it very well upthread:
"Indeed, penguins.

Which is why I am married. I may be a feminist, but I am not delusional and understand that the strength of my convictions won't be much good when I need legal protection inside a patriarchal set up. I don't feel great about it and I certainly don't see it as a free choice - it was the best option available to me at the time, across a set of options which were all circumscribed by the social implications of my having a womb.

What I would like instead of a traditionally demeaning ritual and the promised land of domestic servitude is proper equal pay, proper legal protection and for motherhood to stop being such an obstacle on the job market. The patriarchy can keep the ring."

I can't think of anyone who sees marriage as a primary goal, man or woman.

I know one person whose sole ambition at university was to find a husband, primarily because she wanted to have lots of children and figured that it was more likely she would achieve that with a wealthy husband. But that's the only one I can think of.

I didn't realise I was "supposed" to find a husband at uni and ignored the eligible bachelors and dated people in bands

I don't think marriage comes into it, but I do think people loose sight of having a healthy, stable relationship is an achievement of sorts.

So a cohabited couple of 20+ years I would view as bigger achievement than 3 years married.

Of course it is an ambition for some women to be married. Have you never heard women say they want to get married and have children?

But the idea that marriage is something to be proud of, keeps a lot of women in unhappy marriages. A lot of women feel shame and a sense of failure if their marriage breaks up. As if they haven't achieved what they should have.

I don't see the fact I have lived happily for 22 years with my DP as an achievement. That would imply that someone who has lived with their DP for only 10 years before splitting up, hasn't managed to achieve what I have - as if they just haven't worked hard enough at it.

Relationships/marriages should be fun and supportive. Sure when difficult events occur as they always do, you may struggle together. But ultimately the relationship should be fairly easy to maintain. Because you should enjoy being together.

I meant in my personal opinion, sorry I didn't make that clear,

I wasn't implying other people dont.

Grennie, I agree with you that a married status is nothing special to boast about. But - what is achievement? You say that 22 happy years with your DP is not an achievement. But for other people it may be. And not only because they stay in unhappy relationships due to social pressure (and I agree with you here that this is wrong). Relationships can be very desirable but at the same time difficult for people for all sort of reasons. Many people grow up in dysfunctional families with totally twisted relationship models. Such people may do a lot of work on themselves, go through self-analysis and counseling before they manage to pick a right person and not somebody who will abuse them. Others may learn in the relationship to deal with their own negative behaviour traits such as not seeing housework for me and seeing too much of it for women. Overcoming the twisted ideas about gender and family relations embedded in may of us by our parents and society and through this building a close and loving bond with somebody else is an achievement.

We can also talk about achievement more generally. Academic success is widely regarded as "achievement". But is it for everyone? I somehow feel that it is less so for me, with my forth-generation-to-go-to-uni background, than for my friend who grew up in a house without a single book in sight.

What some get through luck, others get through hard work. But some things are obviously not worth working for.

On further reflection I agree more and more that it depends on how you define 'proud' and I like the example given upthread about being 'proud to be Welsh (or any other nationality, before I get flamed for being Welshist ).

I am married.
I am happy to be married and would marry DH again.
I agree that is down to luck more than anything else and still see that the institution of marriage is a rather outdated legal construct that has its roots v firmly in sexist structures.

nkf Maybe because I don't consider 'marriage' as an institution and more about our personal experiences with marriage. We learn about relationships and marriage from our parents, our friends, family, experiences in life and then make up our own minds what it means to us. Of course marriage will be a personal experience.

I don't see the point in trying to define what marriage means in general? Some people see marriage as just a piece of paper. I see it as more than that, does that make either opinion right or wrong? There may be a legal definition of it, but I think ultimately whether we think marriage is oppressive/a good thing comes down to our personal view on it. It's easy to find stats to support our own view point.

I think it's sad when 'feminists' actually spend their time trying to convince other people that their ideas of marriage is wrong, or that there must be something wrong with them for holding that view.

I don't see the fact I have lived happily for 22 years with my DP as an achievement.

Greenie, I am still very new to this board, is it a convention here where people feel its necessary to keep repeating things they have already written within a thread? I am more used to systems that insert sub-titled replies to other messages within a discussion rather than just appending everything at the end of a monolithic thread, so I can understand why people might repeat themselves a lot more here, sometimes I wish I had myself.

But you seem to have mentioned the time in your relationship and your attitude to it so many times already its starting to seem, to me, that you regard your attitude as some kind of an achievement worthy of pride in and of itself.

Plinky: quite a lot of the time though feminists are right and other people are wrong. And when they realise that the answer to their specific problem is a feminist one (EG 'leave this man. He's abusing you' when they have been told by people around them to stay in the relationship, submit to the man and blame themselves for his abuse of them) they are better off.

'But you seem to have mentioned the time in your relationship and your attitude to it so many times already its starting to seem, to me, that you regard your attitude as some kind of an achievement worthy of pride in and of itself.'

Nail. Head.

I don't really understand why saying you are proud to be in a relationship for 22 years means you are implying peopld who have been in relationships for less time are not as worthy.

I am proud of my 10 year relationship because it is mine, its not saying anything about any other relationship but mine.

Why the insistence that we must judge ourselves by others standzrds and others by our own?

Geckos
I don't think someone saying that they are proud to be in a relationship is implying anything, just that they are proud to be in their relationship.

I have been living with my DH for 30 years and I am proud of it, it doesn't mean I think single people, divorced people or people with shorter relationship shouldn't be proud.

Have you misread my post yesterday? I agree totally with you.

Oops sorry . I did indeed misread your post Geckos

I think getting married and being married is an achievement to be proud of. Being married is part of living a 'responsible' life. Marriage between parents is statistically WAY less likely to end up with children in poverty, as a start. So I suppose if I was to describe my pride in being married I would say I'm proud of being married like I'm proud of being insured or owning a car or owning a house or being promoted in my job.

Further, some of my pride in being married comes from knowing that my husband valued me and respected me sufficiently to want to marry me. He wanted the whole deal. And that makes me feel a bit special (even 5 years down the track).

I don't think you can be proud of having a series of short relationships, or a string of divorces to be honest.

" Marriage between parents is statistically WAY less likely to end up with children in poverty, as a start."

Yes.

Don't you think it's time we stopped condemning the children of non-married parents to poverty?

Men arranged society so that if women didn't live with them, we'd be poorer than if we did. This is a very good way of ensuring that you get to keep the domestic, sexual and emotional services of someone you're not treating properly, who can't afford to withdraw those services and leave you. We need to re-arrange it so that it makes no difference statistically whether you live with a man or not, your household income level is not markedly different. That way, more people would stay married because they want to be married, not because they need to be to function.