I won’t ever get married– partly because I object to the state institution of marriage, but also because I’m old and ornery and too attached to my own independence now– so today’s prompt is a bit of a strange one to answer. For the record, I love weddings, I love couples who pledge their lives and fidelity to one another, I love cake and flowers and Vitamixes and the chicken dance…I love love.
I just don’t love the fundamentally exclusive, overdetermined and state-sanctioned cultural institution of marriage– which bestows civic and economic rewards, for thoroughly undemocratic reasons entirely unrelated to merit, right or desert, which does so at the expense and to the detriment of more than half our democratic citizenry, which has no governing interest other than the managerial consolidation of private property and the compulsory regularization/normalization of sexual behaviors, familial structures and gender expressions– and which has now been marginally modified by the highest court in the land to be a slightly-less-exclusive exclusionary institution.
/rant
Anyway, in a compossible world where marriage wasn’t the horribly unjust institution that it is in this world, if I were forced to choose a song I would like played at my wedding, it would be this one, sung by Otis Redding, “The Glory of Love”:
Give a little. Take a little. Let your little heart cry a little. That’s the story of, that’s the glory of love.
Y’all know what I’m talking about.