Since we’ve been talking about marriage here lately, I thought it would be nice to make a post about my updated views on marriage. For reference, here is my original post from before I met C.

Let’s start at the beginning: I’ve realized that although I made an update mentioning my break-up with C in October, I never made any kind of post—or informed my friends—that we’ve since gotten back together. I suppose I should have done that, but at the time it was quite difficult to distinguish whether we were or wanted to consider ourselves to be friends or dating or what. We were in that weird blurry zone without labels again, basically. So to this day, I still have friends who don’t know that we’re back together, and for that matter, there are still people who never knew we broke up at all… and some people, of course, who never knew we were together in the first place!

I don’t really know why it doesn’t occur to me to tell people these things, honestly. I mean, I would tell them if they asked. But they don’t exactly invite me to hang out with them very often anymore. For some reason, if I’m not standing right in front of them or living in the same dormitory, they just don’t seem to think about me too much. And so we end up going months without talking. I suppose it is sad that I go so long without talking to every single one of my friends, but I’m not sure how to change it. I’m too timid to contact them most of the time. I guess I feel like too much of a bother and a burden if I contact them, but if they contact me it must mean they really want to hang out with me. But this is getting off-topic.

So anyway, C broke up with me basically because our living situation wasn’t working out, and she felt like she needed more space. She was freaking out thinking that there wasn’t any solution, and so she thought that we should just break up. But she still wanted to be friends and made a very big effort to stay in my life. And she has sex with her friends, and she is romantic with her friends. So there weren’t many clear boundaries. When she moved out, she began to recover and feel much more positively towards me again. After a while we were behaving exactly the same way that we would when we first got into a romantic relationship with one another again, except better because we had cleared a lot of what wasn’t working between us. So we agreed to just get back together in labels, as well.

What’s interesting is that when we first got back together, we ended up having sex a lot. This continued for like a month and a half or so, after which it dwindled and dropped down to zero for about a month. During which point we were still feeling very close and intimate, and spending lots of time together, but we were spending that time cuddling, talking, and watching movies and T.V. shows together. Lots of nonsexual intimacy.

Now we’re still not living together, and the time that we are able to spend together has been severely curtailed due to school and work. But we are back to planning what we are going to do for the future. Her plan is to eventually move to Canada because of how much better it is for trans rights there. My plans are much less solid, but I would like to live there with her. It makes sense, then, for us to get married because it would make immigration much easier. And since we are perceived as lesbians, I have no political objection to it. It’s allowed in Canada so our being married wouldn’t be a weird tip-off about her birth sex there. I’m also not worried about the possibility of divorce, because we plan to keep that possibility in mind and keep separate bank accounts. I think we both have a pretty healthy attitude about it.

It’s weird to think of myself as being engaged, although I guess I kind of am? We don’t have a date in mind or anything, we’re just sort of planning to do it eventually. Do people start calling themselves engaged when they have a date in mind, or just when they decide to eventually get married? I don’t see any reason to call her my fiance. I don’t see any reason for us to have a ceremony. (Especially not one that we have spent a lot of money on!) Besides, neither one of us is Christian, so what kind of ceremony would we even have? I do want a ring, but that is mainly to get rid of the annoyance of people hitting on me. I don’t care if she wears one. I don’t see the point of having a wedding. The important part is what comes after that. The important part is the day in, day out ebb & flow of life and relating to one another. I don’t see this as a personal accomplishment, because I was never planning on getting married in the first place, and I don’t think being married is necessarily any better or more fulfilling than not being married. For us, it just makes sense because it is much more practical to do it this way. It’s nothing to be congratulated about. I wish that people would realize that marriage (or the length of a marriage) is not a measure of the success of a relationship or the happiness of the individuals involved, and that there are so many unmarried and single people out there who are way more happy than they would be if they were married, and lots of people out there who have stayed in unhappy marriages/relationships because they think it is a measure of their success as a person.