[imperfect_cupcake]

Me. I said I would NEVER get married. I didn't see the point of it. I said that right from the age of 14, up until I was 40. I didn't know that one day I would be in the UK getting married to a dutch woman in Amsterdam. Try jumping through the paperwork for that. It took us one and half years of solid admin chasing to be able to get the paperwork done for it. The dutch are some of the most officious people on the planet and they want 16 types of proof for everything signed and stamped in five copies from the highest government official possible. Canada doesn't do that kind of thing. They are more shrug your shoulders and say sure, whatever. Try getting those two systems to talk to each other.

But after I got married I totally "got" it. It's not two people living some prescribed life as other think they should, adhering to rules set out for them. It's not chaining yourself to something.

I didn't marry inks because it was expected of me as a normative. If fact, most of my friends "don't belive in marriage" and therefore didn't want to come. I had three friends at my wedding. That's it. No family. They couldn't afford to get there.

The dutch were great though. They helped me celebrate with no preconceived ideas about how inks and should do anything. I realised that married, my marriage, was up to ME to define. To have in any bloody way I and my partner fucking felt like.

Maybe it's because I've studied anthropology so I understand that marraige has meant vastly different things to different groups of people. People always think marriage is actually the way the gentry in Western Europe did it, the values and such around it. Poor people didn't get married that way. They just said "you wanna be my wife?" She said "yes" and that was it, you were married. And you *could* get a divorce. But the gentry couldnt. Rich people married for business transactions. So it was a contract you couldn't get out of. It wasn't about love. It was about money.

I've studied the history of Western European marriage as well. When it all started, in the UK anyway, round the 1600s. The actual ceremony I mean. It's because of the fear of catholosim and a way for the churches to make a bit of dosh.

Anyway, people have been changing and redefining marriage for thousands of years. So I get to make the rules for my own relationship.

So we did. We had our own agreements, our own ceremony and our own desires of what kind of life each of us wanted.

I didn't understand that you could have that kind of independence in marraige as long as that's what you both wanted. It's finding someone that wants the same thing. And that *is* the whole point of any commitment, regardless of civil marraige or not.

When my mom got partnered again, domestic partnership from living together for two years, he and she both went to lawyers and drew up documents that kept absolutely everything seperate. My step dad was never a dad to me, more like an uncle. Mom was the boss of her home. He was the boss of his. He never interfered with her decisions around money, kids or health. They still had a legal and biding relationship in the eyes of the law. They declared they were living together on their taxes for two years (even though it was just part time).

So no ceremony, but still a legal and binding contract. Dissolvable by declaring separation of one year. Which was no different than my divorce. The only difference was I called my partner "wife" and she called her partner "domestic partner" on forms.