Marriage: Love and Law exhibition catalogue - Flipbook - Page 114
In my case, I finally found someone where the time together
actually gets better, the journey gets better … even the sex gets
better. It’s not like the movies, with those horrid depictions
of marital malaise, or even the nauseatingly vanilla depictions
of smiling nuclear families. Marriage is something else entirely,
a unique source of challenges and strengths. And it’s bloody
great when it works. My life would be less without what we have
found together, and there is no doubt the fact we are married
has created a bond that is more firmly recognised socially and
legally—practical reasons many couples who have been denied
marriage in the past are getting married now.
modern enough to recognise the diversity of real couples. Love does not have
one sexuality, one race, one belief system, religion or culture. In that way,
having been allowed the opportunity to learn and grow and make mistakes
in marriage is a privilege others do not have, or have not had until very recently.
It makes me lucky, as does the privilege of being able to exit unhealthy or
unsuitable relationships.
Perhaps one question to ask is why someone who has divorced would want
to remarry at all? Why get back on the horse, as it were, and try to ride it into
the proverbial sunset, when your previous attempt(s) have seen you smashed
on the ground nursing a critically bruised heart, and, let’s be honest, more often
than not a thoroughly trodden pocket book? It may seem counter-intuitive,
but the majority of us divorced types do remarry. Perhaps surprisingly though,
in contrast to the stereotypes about men loving the bachelor life and women
being desperate to get hitched, a 2013 Pew Research Center survey
showed that some 30 per cent of divorced or widowed men said they wouldn’t
do it again while in contrast, a majority of 54 per cent of women stated that
they would not be getting back on that horse again, thank you very much.
Over time, the majority do remarry, but more men do than women.
Likewise, women are more likely to file for divorce.
The ideal of a happy marriage was imprinted on me early, as my parents,
Janni and Bob, had 25 good years before her untimely death from multiple
myeloma in 1990. They balanced one another. They were each other’s
confidantes, friends. They were a team. No doubt those who are against the
institution have their own stories to tell, and they certainly have plenty
of solid reasons to choose from to be anti-marriage, not least the institution’s
chequered history. In the past, a wife was considered property of her new
husband, and though that may no longer be legally the case in Australia
or comparative countries, the traditions that went with it are still being
negotiated. As any historian will tell you, the phrase ‘giving away the bride’ was
intended literally, as under the doctrine of coverture, women were property,
transferred from father to husband. A nod to this doctrine continues
in contemporary ceremonies, with the ‘giving away’ of the bride from the
father to the husband. I even included this in my first wedding more than
25 years ago. Like many brides at the time I didn’t think much about the
meaning of ‘being given away’.
If marriage is a horse, it’s an unpredictable one – a horse that can support you,
that can carry you in sickness and in health; or beat you under its hooves.
There may be factors that can reduce the likelihood of a split – mutual respect
and honesty, and according to various stats: 1. being over 25 years of age;
2. being of a similar age; 3. having a tertiary education; 4. not being a couple
in which one smokes and one doesn’t. There are more stats (being a dancer
or bartender are apparently major red flags for future divorce) but in any case,
at any age or level of education—despite cheats like a rather unsettling
‘divorce calculator’ online—there are simply no guarantees.
Perhaps more pressingly, taking a husband’s name after marriage stems from
that history of wives as property, and women’s formal titles were once entirely
usurped by their husband’s name, so that Jane would become simply
Mrs. John Doe. (This is still sometimes seen on conservative wedding
invitations.) In Australia the vast majority of women still give up their last
names upon marriage and this is less negotiable than one might like to believe.
‘People don’t get too fussed when women take a man’s surname on at marriage,
which over 80 per cent of women still do, but get quite uppity if a woman
doesn’t want to take a man’s name on,’ Associate Professor Yvonne CorcoranNantes tells ABC radio. As recently as the 1970s, American state laws actually
required a woman to use her husband’s name to vote, do her banking or to
get a passport. It bears mentioning that in many places this is not only not the
norm, but actually illegal. It is not legal for a woman to take her husband’s name
in France, Greece, Italy, Belgium, and in Quebec. Further, local custom in Korea,
The question of why someone takes a chance on marriage the second or
third time around is where stats don’t cut it. In real life, your partner and the
relationship you form is impossible to distill into a pie chart or Hallmark card.
There are trends, yes, but no two relationships or marriages are the same.
It is quite possible to be a person who has had failed relationships in the past
and has a successful relationship in the future.
One close friend of mine who was in a decades long de facto relationship finally
accepted the proposal to marry her partner when he was diagnosed with late
stage cancer. He wanted her to have the added certainty of having been his
legally recognised wife, and this helped her manage his medical care in his final
months and his estate after he passed.
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