[BRIEF NOTE] "Heart's desire"
Feb. 14th, 2008 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldIn the Valentine's Day issue of fab, Bert Archer has an article, "Heart's desire", speculates about the impact that same-sex marriage in particular and the acceptability of long-term same-sex relationships in general on same-sex relationships, by providing these relationships for the first time with the sort of legally- and socially-accepted structures that heterosexuals have taken for granted.
Reading articles like Archer's reminds me of the results from Zheng Wu's 1998 Statistics Canada paper "Recent Trends in Marriage Patterns in Canada", which suggests that marriage isn't being so much dropped as postponed, with the exception of Québec where long-term cohabitation is emerging as a common alternative to marriage. It seems that some sort of convergence is actually happening in this country, now that the artificial brakes of prejudice and stigma are being removed.
If Canada wasn't that way, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to carry on the relationship that that wasn't the case, if I couldn't write the words like "I love you, Jerry." I'm just glad that I don't have to imagine that particular uchronia.
It’s dangerous, or at least precarious, to make epochal statements but I think I’m on pretty solid ground here. John Boswell and his Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe notwithstanding, two people of the same sex have never before, in the recorded history of the world, been able to marry each other using the same system opposite-sex couples do. This changes things a lot.
Reading articles like Archer's reminds me of the results from Zheng Wu's 1998 Statistics Canada paper "Recent Trends in Marriage Patterns in Canada", which suggests that marriage isn't being so much dropped as postponed, with the exception of Québec where long-term cohabitation is emerging as a common alternative to marriage. It seems that some sort of convergence is actually happening in this country, now that the artificial brakes of prejudice and stigma are being removed.
If Canada wasn't that way, I can only imagine how difficult it would be for me to carry on the relationship that that wasn't the case, if I couldn't write the words like "I love you, Jerry." I'm just glad that I don't have to imagine that particular uchronia.
