2006-05-15
Anything to Keep My Baby Happy
In about eight years, I am going to marry my best friend.
Unless one of us meets a mate between now and then, we are going to take full advantage of same-sex marriage and have a wedding. You know... marry each other.
This plan covers a host of possibilities:
1. A wedding! We get the whole she-bang. We agreed on ivory (but not too yellow) dresses, rings that fit our arrangement, a registry that will maximize gift-giving from our friends and family, and that our wedding will be a destination wedding, like a, elaborate Hawaiian luau or on a Mexican beach. This way, the slide show will be gorgeous and we'll still be young enough to enjoy all of the outdoor adventures that a week in a tropical paradise might offer. Our only trouble would be finding a honeymoon that would top a wedding in the tropics but I'm thinking that we might both be game for two weeks in Paris, the city of love. We can both find plenty of European college kids to make out with while we also enjoy the culture and the amazingly fresh food in France.
2. Security! We'll certainly have an easier time buying a sprawling home in a nice part of town together than separately. We're actually thinking about a duplex because ours isn't a gay marriage. We would TOTALLY continue to date men. It's just that as married best friends, we would get to date from behind the financial and emotional security of a legal partnership. Think about it. I know. It's brilliant. We're The Golden Girls, and it's LEGAL. I can add her to my insurance and she can contribute her share of that cost to the house fund.
Or the travel fund.
We decided that the money would stay separate, except for two major finding areas:
The House Budget
The Vacation Arena
She might be my wife but she's not getting all my money when I kick it.
Actually, beyond the funny "what-if" value, this is the same thing women of a certain age have been doing for centuries.
It's just legalized and official.
By age 40, the biological clock is shopping for a walker for its reproductive abilities. Because of the fact that this is a plan for after 40, let's leave out children. Without them, isn't a marriage essentially a lifelong committment to partnership with someone whom you love and respect?
Pretend I meet a romantic partner, a husband if you will, after I'm 40 and I'm no longer considering children as a reality. How would I merge my life with someone who would always be a stranger, relative to the breadth of my friendship with Chelsea?
Not that I wouldn't fall madly in love with someone later in my life and honestly, not that I don't look forward to the next time I fall madly and mutually in love. But obviously... that person wouldn't be as capable of making decisions for me if I should become incapacitated as Chelsea is.
He will have never held my hair back while I yak in the parking lot of Miss Kitty's whereas Chips?
She and I hauled each other's barely capacitated selves into bed any number of times when we were 23. And out of bed to go to work int he morning. Who could forget her standing over my futon, the kind that lays on the floor, and turning on the over-head light? The fumes of alcohol wafted off of her as she wlked on my "bed" and tried to take the covers off while the whole time I yelled, "Sleeping paradise! Sleeping paradise!".
Why should married people be the only people to get a wedding? It's a clich�d question, I know, but I'm a girl who loves her Hope Chest.
A lot of self-aware and successful women agree that not getting a wedding is the only part of not having a husband that is the problem.
Women take care of each other. We forge deep, lasting, emotional bonds with each other and we build communities together than men don't build. Men age and find themselves alone.
Women?
Not so much. A lot of the female original-thinkers out there are aging and we are doing it together.
You know, with our Gay Brethren �
Holla!
But truly, I do want a wedding.
It�s possible that right now, more than I want a husband, I want to pick out a dress and flowers and a cake and REGISTER and buy my bridesmaids pearl-drop necklaces. I haven�t met someone that I would marry, and I say that because I assume that if I had, I�d probably be married.
And divorced, but whatevski.
Anyway, I am not bending on how happy I am in my own Sarah World. Right now, that world doesn�t have a man in it and I don�t see why I would expect that it will. This isn�t a comment that expresses any emotion � it�s just a fact. I�m not meeting people anymore, remember?
They have to meet me.
And I�m not making it purposefully difficult but I�m being totally myself. Someone will come along and fall in love or not.
It don�t make no difference to me.
I either get a wedding or my fun life without the challenge of emotional and financial compromise.
Unless a really fantastic guy comes along and he's a person who builds me up for unselfish reasons, and vice-versa, then I don't get a wedding.
Because I cannot emphasize enough that there's no fucking way I am marrying just anyone.
If you can't get that I am being stone-cold serious than you need to navigate away, with quickness.
So why wouldn�t I marry my best friend?
She�s not just anyone and isn�t part of the institution of marriage the fact that you commit to one another your loving support?
When I mentioned to her that I really wanted to wear a veil, even though she prefers no veil and flowers, she conceded that veils are important to Jewish girls and said that she�d do anything to keep her baby happy.
Which�.
I gotta say�.
Is the first time I�ve ever heard someone say that and mean it.
I�m really thinking that eight years from now, we could be embarking on a major legal bonus for single, American women.
Oh hell yeah!
We would not only get a wedding but we�d be hetero-feminist heroes to boot.
Sweet!
A silver service AND making history.
Eight years, mon ami.
We can start planning at 39, if you want, because I�d do anything for my baby, too.
arizonasarah at 11:13 a.m.