Instructor's Notes

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Michael Cobb

The Marriage Imperative

Michael Cobb, an English professor at the University of Toronto, is the author of Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (2012) and God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (2006), both published by the New York University Press. In the following essay, published in the op-ed section of the New York Times on June 30, 2015, Cobb offers his interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage.

AS YOU READ: What important similarities does Cobb find between married and single people?

1

Now all of us single people are pathetic, not just the straight ones.“Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there,” writes Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. As I read that bit alone in my apartment, I choked on my coffee.

2

Isn’t it enough to be denied the “constellation° of benefits that the States have linked to marriage”? A constellation my coupled queer sisters and brethren° now can hold dearly if they just make it official? Once again, being single is the dreary, awful, mournful alternative to marriage. A condition to be pitied, and quickly corrected by a sprint to City Hall.

3

As I read on, I started to wonder how Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan—two of the most high-profile single women in the federal government—felt as they reviewed and had to join Justice Kennedy’s opinion: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.”

4

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican presidential hopeful, is also single, and has had to endure some humiliating questions about his marital status, including who would be his “first lady”: “Well, I’ve got a sister, she could play that role if necessary,” was his excellent response. I wonder how the senator felt, after last week’s decision, when he learned that to be denied marriage is to be “condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions”?

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5

Marriage equality activists could have pursued a different agenda—challenging the need for sexual scrutiny by the state, and the constellation of benefits that belong to marriage—but they didn’t. Instead of dreaming up new forms of governance, they asked to be ruled by the ones that already exist.

6

And so old questions remain: Why can’t I put a good friend on my health care plan? Why can’t my neighbor and I file our taxes together so we could save some money, as my parents do? If I failed to make a will, why is it unlikely a dear friend would inherit my estate?

7

The answers to all these questions are the same: It’s because I’m not having sex with those people. (To make matters worse, that also means we probably didn’t have children together.) For the only thing that truly distinguishes romance and marriage from other loving intimacies like friendships, other familial relationships and close business partnerships is that sex is (or once was) part of the picture.

8

So yes, marriage equality erases an odious and invidious° distinction among straight and us not-straight citizens for which I’m truly glad and which I celebrate. And it’ll make lots of people’s lives better. But it also leaves unexamined the reason sex seems to give you benefits and recognition—and why it orders the world and civilization.

9

In granting same-sex couples “equal dignity in the eyes of the law,” Justice Kennedy throws everyone under the “just married” limo. Dignity—the state of being worthy of honor or respect—is undeniably appealing. One reading of the majority opinion suggests, however, one isn’t dignified unless one can be married. But some of us can’t or won’t ever find that special someone. We might not have the luck or the timing or the inclination.

10

If dignity is predicated on being lucky in love, then what happens when your luck runs out?

11

Well, you join 50.2 percent (or 124.6 million) of America’s adults, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics last year. And that means that you’ll be misunderstood as living a miserable, lonely life by the other 49.8 percent. They’ll deny you adequate language, representation, and consideration—except as the thing to avoid becoming. Even if you’re having a happy, rewarding life, they’ll assume you’re not.

12

But singleness includes everyone at some point, even those who are married: love ends; spouses cheat; someone dies first. To be in a marriage, no matter how strong, is always a precarious condition, which means that the dignity you’ve been given can be taken away at any moment.

13

The grim implication: We’re all “condemned” to the ever-present shadow characterization of singleness for at least some time, doomed to “call out only to find no one there,” which binds us more desperately to the marriage imperative° and rights that aren’t ours, no matter how hard we love.

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14

A marriage equality based upon dignity makes pathetic singles of us all.

15

Certainly Justice Kennedy’s sense of marital “dignity” is over the top. But it’s not just sentimental rhetoric:° It’s a kind of legal “term of heart” that can keep you up at night. The words and the value they communicate are impossible to avoid, and often difficult to resist. It’s as if the words of Justice Kennedy and my grandmother, who, on her deathbed, begged me to get married, have melded together in my head, declaring my life lacking—emotions meet law and then throw me into a state of emotional insecurity.

16

I am usually a relatively happy single person who wrote a book advocating for the dignity of single people (a colleague asked if I was writing that book so I could get more dates). But even I hear coupledom’s call: I sometimes crave a long-term relationship with that great guy; I watch Ang Lee’s take on Sense and Sensibility monthly; I’ve been in a number of relationships that broke my heart—all of which feels very undignified. But none of those longings, hauntings, and hurts should pave the way for my constitutional dignity. I already feel too governed from the inside of my anxious heart, which doesn’t make, as my grandmother certainly knew, the best choices.

17

If you’re truly lucky in this life, you might have many relationships that “embody,” in varying degrees, “the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” whether or not those relationships include sex. Better yet, these relationships might give you a general feeling of dignity, well-being, and justice.

18

Being single doesn’t mean that the world is empty and awful. Senator Graham reminded people that his life was not destitute without a wife: “I’ve got a lot of friends. We’ll have a rotating first lady.”

19

What Justice Kennedy, and everyone else too, needs to remember is that simply being yourself—your single self—is already the fundamental form of dignity. Founding your dignity on something as flimsy and volatile as a sexual connection insures dignity’s precariousness as it enshrines° your inherent unworthiness as a single individual.

Questions to Start You Thinking

Link to the Paired Essay

Both “The Marriage Imperative” and “Searching for Your Soul Mate” discuss the difficulties in finding the perfect mate. How would Cobb respond to Ansari’s definition of a soul mate? Would Cobb agree that marriage is the logical next step to finding a soul mate?

Journal Prompts

Suggestions for Writing