An Amazing Year for Marriage – Elena Larssen

Through a powerful Vote No campaign thousands of people organized and raised their voices, and a constitutional amendment limiting marriage rights to straight people was prevented from passage.  Initially, it was thought to be impossibly unrealistic; up until the votes were tallied, many people didn’t believe that ‘equal marriage’ stood a chance against ‘traditional marriage.’

The morning of the vote, I went to my gym.  After my workout, I was in the locker room, getting ready to head to work at the Minnesota Conference of the United Church of Christ.  As a pro-equal marriage church, I was planning to wear my ‘Vote No’ T-shirt to work and threw it over the door to my locker while I dried my hair.  As I finished, I hear three women commenting loudly on my shirt.

“When traditional marriage is affirmed, everyone will be so surprised that they spent time on that.” The conversation continued, because each of the women had to declare her personal affection for her token gay male friend: the hairdresser, the cake decorator, the party planner – all of whom were being paid to be ‘her friend’ – and whose friendship guaranteed that this woman was not being bigoted.  The consensus was that their gay friends were alright, but no one needed to redefine marriage.

That was at 8 a.m., and by the end of the evening it was clear that equal marriage had won.  And the surprise that had turned to confidence turned to joy.

The year of 2012 was also an amazing year for marriage because, in 2012, I married a talented and charming man.  This was only slightly less surprising than the defeat of the amendment.

A long-time solo flyer, I met and immediately, massively fell in love with another United Church of Christ minister, making us a pair of differently gendered progressive Christian ministers.  In Minnesota, this was relatively interesting but what really impressed people was that we were both from the West Coast and had met in Minnesota.  As expatriate Californians, we took to our Minnesotanism with zeal: attending the State Fair, traveling to Mount Rushmore, spending time at The Lake and eating more red meat than my entire, Northern Californian crunchy-granola-home town put together.

Given our progressive religious stance and our shared political convictions, getting engaged was not only a personal decision, it was a political act.  Having performed dozens of weddings for friends and in my work as a campus minster at Stanford University, I knew that there were lots of straight couples who were grappling with whether or not to avail themselves of a privilege denied to so many. I raised the question first, “So, uh, are we really going to, you know, get legally married?”

What happened next was fascinating.  My then-fiancé said that, yes, he believed we should legally marry, because to stand in solidarity with those who couldn’t marry was a form of activism that was too easily kept private.  Instead of solidarity, he preferred a more open form of activism.  And I said: great – as long as we really do it. No fair getting legally married without demonstrating concern that other could not.

And so our period of engagement, wedding planning, and the first weeks of our marriage were a time when we strategically used our wedding as a way to raise some awareness about the questions of the times.  My fiancé became a bit of media sensation in the Fargo-Moorhead area, as the pastor of the only LBGT welcoming church in the area, and we posted the following item on our wedding website:

A word about marriage and marriage equality…

In 2012, our home state of Minnesota is considering a constitutional amendment that would extend the existing law that prevents legal marriages between same gendered people and place it into the state constitution.

Given the heat of this issue and our belief that this is unjust, it’s an interesting year to get married!

We talked about the best way to express our views that marriage should be legal for same-gendered couples because, in our beliefs about honoring the religious faith of others, we also understand that there are faithful people on both sides of the issue.  In the spirit of the times, we share the following news items from our church that explore the concept of marriage and our faith-based belief that God blesses all weddings.

And here is the thing that was really amazing.  I learned less about the politics of marriage from anti-amendment fight than I did from fighting the sucking vortex of winds that is the wedding-industrial complex in our country.

The minute he ‘put a ring on it,’ I ceased to be myself.  I, who was concerned about the political statement our relationship could make and the justice implications of legal marriage for all, was instead cast into a rabbit hole of wedding business marketing, for I became A Bride.

Many women have written about resisting the consumer culture pressures of Bridehood, and I’m pretty proud of how we handled things.  Our primary tactic was hiring our friends, and keeping our modest wedding dollars in the communities we liked and respected.  But hustle of Brideliness and All Things Bridal taught me a couple of hard lessons about marriage in our country.

First, people will lie to a bride.  They will lie right to your face about how you look, or whether there are problems in the planning of the wedding.  They will lie to you because, since you are a bride, you are doomed to be naturally irrational and prone to hysterics.  Therefore, it is better to simply tell the bride that the cake is on its way than tell her the truth that her mother left it in the freezer back at the house.  Because a bride is a woman, hyped up on attention and control and the power of childhood dreams come true…or so people would like to think.  It’s far more convenient to write off a bride as a bridezilla than it is to actually address her needs and follow her directions.

Secondly, the frou-frou of the wedding is a cover-up for the gender inequity that is still expected in marriages between men and women.  Early on in the amendment fight, I realized that part of the reason some opposed equal marriage between people of the same gender was because they opposed equal marriage between people of differing genders.  Marriage, for these proponents of ‘tradition,’ was a matching of two unequal parties whose differences were labeled ‘complimentary’ and used as a justification for vastly divided social roles; the idea that two people of similar economic, legal and social power could match up in love and life was not just a challenge with same gendered couples, but with me and my husband to-be.  Somehow, love and vision for a shared life wasn’t enough; there had to be some kind of leader-follower dependency to make a marriage a marriage.

We still encounter awkward moments, from traditionalists who are surprised that my husband is so excited about my career, and from progressives who are dismayed when I am comfortable with him taking the lead. We are starting to say that our relationship is not an affirmative action project, but that we both make decisions and have power over one another’s choices, and that we both are breadwinners and housekeepers.  For us it’s about investing in a shared life, not simply a life where two individuals live, love and work in a tandem form of parallel play.

And I suppose that’s what is difficult for some people to see about our ‘equal marriage.’  Beyond the frou-frou of the wedding and regardless of the legality of our wedding, our relationship is a reflection of our Christian habit of putting the ‘us’ before the ‘me.’ We aren’t just two people, negotiating to maintain our individual well-being; we are covenanted to be a new thing, and it is our task to perceive that new thing, nourish it, and celebrate the marital covenant that brought us into being.

This is the gift of a religious wedding and a Christian marriage: we know our straight and equal marriage isn’t threatened by anyone else’s.  We know it’s about the ‘us’ that God has created, and it’s my prayer that everyone have the opportunity to legally and liturgically become the ‘us’ that God has called them to be.  And then, we can worry about a consumer culture that thrives on and reinforces stereotypes which force marriage back into a paradigm of power trade-offs instead of mutuality and community.

That’s what I learned, being married in the amazing year of 2012.  I won’t forget it.

And I’ll never lie to a bride.

Elena Larssen has served as Associate Conference Minister in the Minnesota Conference of the United Church of Christ since 2008. A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz and Pacific School of Religion, Elena has served congregations and in campus ministry at Stanford University. A Director for the Board of Ministerial Assistance (Christmas Fund), Elena is a Presidential Fellow of the United Church of Christ. Elena spends her free time with her new husband, Mark Pettis, and even newer basset hound puppy, Clyde.