I heard they've picked a bride for me, I hope she's pretty!

Apparently Housemate David encountered a wrong-but-difficult-to-disprove argument against marriage and needs some assistance. That which is wrong on the Internet: In a world where suddenly all marriage is gone and no one ever remembers it was there, there is no meaning lost. No one remembers that meaning; no one would regret losing that meaning. It's the transition that doesn't work.

As much as I would like to leave David twisting on this one in the hopes that he'll trade his liberal ideology for a conservative one, he did the dishes after the Yale Mafia Weekend Symposium, so I'll throw him a rope. This American Prospect article illustrates pretty persuasively that there's a difference between thinking of marriage as publicly ratifying a preexisting relationship and marriage as a way to fit your relationship into a preexisting tradition, thereby transforming it into something slightly different (both by changing the parties' behaviors and simply by putting the relationship in the context of the past).

One wouldn't expect a left-wing feminist who refers to her partner as "a great human being who happens to be male" to wind up admitting that the latter definition is correct, but there you have it:

. . . Why not avoid the temptation to fall into a his-and-hers routine by never adopting the marriage label? I have a fantasy that, without the dominant culture's definitions of husband and wife as default, my partner and I will be constantly pushed to reinvent our relationship, question our assumptions about who should do what, and stay honest and authentic.

Marriage enforces certain traditional behaviors through the sheer weight of the past. She's not sold on that being a good thing, but she does admit that it's an inescapable fact of marraige and that she has queer and feminist friends for whom the idea of fitting their romance into something bigger is preferable to "staying honest and authentic." Whatever that means.

More on marriage as tradition here, including Eve's very economical nutshelling of the above argument:

Do you all think there is a difference between a "contract with the community" and "entrance into a tradition?" Those two seem to have different resonances with me, to the point that when I hear "contract with the community" I think, "Oh God, Hillary Clinton wants to raise me like a baby," whereas when I hear "entrance into a tradition" I think, "Oh, that sounds cool and beautiful and somehow aesthetically pleasing."