“She’s not my friend anymore”

The Discourses of Marriage group is delighted to be able to share this piece by Dr Liz Morrish (Nottingham Trent University), which shows some of the complexities associated with language choice and marriage for same-sex couples.

Meanwhile, our work exploring the data from our surnames survey continues...watch this space (or see our previous post) for more information!

Thanks to Liz for sharing this piece with us. 

She's not my friend anymore

 “Those pants suit you” I said to the woman in Athleta on 5^th Avenue, New York. “My friend is in there trying on the same ones”.

Sender would like to recall message. I am appalled at my betrayal. Hardly has the ink dried on our marriage certificate, and I have already repudiated my spouse. If discourse brings about identity, then mine is still stuck in that queer limbo of illegitimacy that she and I have inhabited for the last 25 years.

Too much information. The woman in the store didn’t need to know all of this. But then again, why not? How easy it would have been to announce a husband to the most casual of acquaintances. So why not my, my, my wwwwww. No. I still can’t say the ‘w’ word. It’s a bit too Susan Calman. She is my partner in marriage, my trouble-and-strife, her-indoors, my spouse.

Shame is the eternal companion to the queer subject, even decades after decriminalization. Shame at the non-normativity of being queer. Shame at never quite fully accepting myself. Shame at finding it so difficult to lay claim to the legitimacy now offered to me. Because the day before, I had got married, hitched, wedded, espoused. To my ‘friend’ in the changing booth behind us. We arrived at City Hall, in Wall Street with our two witnesses. We took a numbered ticket and sat down to wait on the green benches until we went into the small chapel, and there, stumbling and trembling on the words, I was married to the love of my life. I have thought about that moment every day since.

If you are wondering what all the equivocation is about, just consider this. Shame is not a singular event; it accrues over a lifetime, undermining like a degenerative disease. From earliest childhood, all we have known are anxieties about being feminine enough, straight enough, respectable enough. As we emerge from the family we encounter an immersive queering as school firmly establishes our outsider status when we are found desiring sports or activities deemed the provenance of the so-called opposite ‘sex’. Our world falls into a preserve of binaries that seems to have forgotten to give us an entry pass.

So when Section 28 came along in the United Kingdom in 1988, gay subjectivity was already complicit in its own illegitimacy. Forbidden: "the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".

So there you have it. My relationship is a mere simulation of the real thing. Maybe that is why my marriage seemed rather like a mirage. I think back to that brief ceremony. Brief, but not perfunctory. The Clerk had it all right. She must have met bashful queers before. So habitually circumspect about public displays of affection, we had to be prompted twice to take each other’s hands. We hesitated on the permissive ‘you may kiss your spouse’.

So it is still sinking in, what marriage means to someone who has never thought it would be a possibility. What it will mean for us as a couple. But now that we have done it, I need to step up and take a stand of visibility. No more covering with euphemisms, or letting false assumptions persist. I am claiming the right that heterosexuals have to ‘flaunt it’ in the simple avowal of their relationships. I’m going to celebrate the joy that has come in the authoring, and authorisation of our new connection. She’s not ‘my friend’ anymore.

Liz Morrish

January, 2015