it means to be a wife, a married partner, has changed. In the summer of 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry each other—a decision that validated the relatively recent conception of marriage as a mutual affirmation of love and commitment, and also reconfigured it as an institution that could be entered into on gender-equal terms. “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” reads the final paragraph of the decision. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were….It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” On the Friday that the decision was handed down, I’d planned on staying in, but then the news electrified me with such happiness that I went out, and ended up at the club on mushrooms. I remember standing still, people dancing all around me, my heart like Funfetti cake, reading the decision’s final paragraph on my phone screen over and over as I cried.
The constitutional right to gay marriage brings the institution into its viable future. To many people at the tail end of my generation, and to much of the generation that follows, it may already seem incomprehensible that gay couples once did not have the right to marry—as incomprehensible as it feels to me when I imagine not being able to apply for a credit card on my own. This is an era in which marriage is generally understood not as the beginning of a partnership but as the avowal of that partnership. It’s an era in which women graduate from college in greater numbers than men, and often outearn men in their twenties; an era in which women are no longer expected to get married to have sex or to build a stable adulthood, and are consequently delaying marriage, sometimes forgoing it altogether. Today, only around 20 percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960. Marriage is becoming more equal on every front. “In part, that’s because when we delay marriage, it’s not just women who become independent,” Rebecca Traister writes in All the Single Ladies. “It’s also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”
Many of the weddings I’ve been to have reflected this shift. The fetishization of virginal purity has been largely removed from the picture: even in Texas, among religious conservatives, it is often implicitly acknowledged that the engaged couple has prepared for a life together in ways that include having sex. Thankfully, I can’t remember the last time I saw a bouquet toss. Often, both parents walk the bride down the aisle. One ceremony featured the bride and groom’s daughters as flower girls. One of my Peace Corps friends proposed to her male partner on a beach in Senegal. While writing this, I went to a wedding in Cincinnati where, post-kiss, the officiant proudly announced the couple as “Dr. Katherine Lennard and Mr. Jonathon Jones.” A few weeks later, I attended another wedding, this one in Brooklyn, where the couple entered the ceremony together, and the bride, the writer Joanna Rothkopf, delivered her vows in two sentences, one of which was a Sopranos joke. (“I love you more than Bobby Bacala loves Karen, and luckily I can’t cook so you’ll never have to eat my last ziti.”) A few weeks after that, I drove upstate for another wedding, where my friend Bobby was preceded down the aisle by the four women in his wedding party, and he and his husband, Josh, walked to the altar holding hands.
On the whole, though, the “traditional” wedding—meaning the traditional straight wedding—remains one of the most significant re-invocations of gender inequality that we have. There is still a drastic mismatch between the cultural script around marriage, in which a man grudgingly acquiesces to a woman salivating for a diamond, and the reality of marriage, in which men’s lives often get better and women’s lives often get worse. Married men report better mental health and live