LOVE AND MARRIAGE: Jim Woodhill

You will make yourself crazy (not to mention a great polemical target for Andrew Sullivan et. al.) if you try to define "marriage" in terms of any *essential* activity (/refraining from activity). There are valid marriages where the partners raise children and ones where they don't. There are valid marriages where the partners love and care for each other and others where they don't. There are valid marriages where the partners have sex only with each other, and valid marriages where they don't. Indeed, as Caitlin Flanagan wrote in her review of various books on marital celibacy, there are valid marriages where the partners have sex with no one at all. (At my suggestion, a recently-divorced lady colleague of mine polled her "happily married" 30-something friends and was shocked how many of these women told her that they had last had sex with their husbands years ago.)

In olden days, at least among royalty, it was very clear what "marriage" was--it was the only available way of uniting two separate families. Today, it is one of two available ways that people can formally become "family" to each other (the other is by adoption of one by the other). One of the problems we have in the fight against gay marriage is that the position that there should be *no* way in which gay people can formally become "family" to each other is very hard to defend. (Not to mention the need to make having sex and having babies out of wedlock (which gays may do today) a *conservative* cause.)

posted by Eve at 7:59 PM VOTE

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