LOVE AND MARRIAGE: Jason Kuznicki

In the fourteen months that I've been married, I have lost count of how many times someone has asked me to show them my wedding ring. But Scott and I have never exchanged rings, neither at our legal marriage nor during the five years that we considered ourselves married in spirit. ...

...I would never ask for Scott's love out of compulsion--and I would never love him if he demanded obedience from me. ...

But this isn't a post about gay marriage; it's a post about the marriage band, or the lack thereof. This weekend was my twenty-eighth birthday, and I am coming to realize that unbandedness has a number of other meanings, not all of which I can control.

As Wikipedia tactfully notes, "It is considered rude to make sexual overtures to a man or woman wearing a wedding ring."

What Wikipedia fails to mention is that for the ringless, there exists a remarkable double standard. It is considered polite and even flattering for a man to make sexual overtures toward an unbanded woman. But for a man of a certain age, being unbanded is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. You're either unable, unwilling, jilted... or maybe you're gay. ...

Let's not forget, having a band presents difficulties of its own. Strangers would be even more likely to assume that I was straight, and I've never come across as especially gay in person. Worse, bandedness smacks of conformity at a time when marital innovation has probably never had so great an opportunity. Now is the time for experiment, for devising new cultural signifiers and doing away with the old.

And, in an era when gay marriage is frankly contested, wearing the band almost seems to presume too much. It's never going to convince the traditionalists, and it's not going to impress the radicals.

So I've come to like being unbanded. It throws my lot in with the misfits, with the misunderstood, with the loners. It shakes people up a bit. It makes them question what's really important about a marriage and what's a mere distraction. And that, to my mind, is single most important thing that gay marriage itself might stand to teach the general public.

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posted by Eve at 8:10 PM VOTE

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