Gay divorce
May. 29th, 2004 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jere7myA gay friend of mine broke up with his long-term boyfriend a while ago. (He does not read LJ, as far as I know, but if he does: hi, and I hope this doesn't upset you.) They'd been living together for a long time, merged their CD collections, built a life together. When writing about it, he several times referred to the breakup as a "divorce," though they'd never been married.
This jarred. Even though I refer to gay couples in long-term relationships as "married" (if they seem to be), I would never think of that ending as a divorce. To me, marriage is a personal agreement, which may or may not be sanctioned by the state or the church, but divorce is fundamentally legal. It can't be disentangled from the state sanction, because it's the breaking of that sanction, and the legal unpleasantness that comes with it, that makes divorce so difficult. It's the expense of lawyers and the acrimony of court settlement, the picayune unraveling of bureaucratic detail. It's the difference between slapping a masher at a bar and filing against your boss for sexual harassment.
K pointed out, and I agree, that for gay and otherwise unmarried couples there really isn't a word that denotes the breaking of a long-term commitment; our friend, she said, was probably looking for a word that conveys that empty, shattered-life feeling, which "breakup" doesn't. I don't think that divorce is the right replacement, though, unless the marriage is a legal one. Married couples often break up long before the divorce -- they separate, divide their households, sometimes years before the divorce is actually final. Sometimes one partner runs out on the other, fleeing to Iowa, never to be heard from again. That separation is analagous to what happens at the end of a long-term unmarried commitment; the divorce is another thing, running in parallel, which can be awful in its own right.
I've been through two divorces (as an offspring, not a spouse), which probably explains why this twigged me. Even if the marriage is horrible -- even if you're delighted to be leaving this person, looking forward to a life alone, as my mom was after her second marriage -- the legal aspects of the divorce can still suck you down into a bleak morass of depression for months. That's not true if, as far as the state is concerned, you can just walk away.
What do y'all think?
This jarred. Even though I refer to gay couples in long-term relationships as "married" (if they seem to be), I would never think of that ending as a divorce. To me, marriage is a personal agreement, which may or may not be sanctioned by the state or the church, but divorce is fundamentally legal. It can't be disentangled from the state sanction, because it's the breaking of that sanction, and the legal unpleasantness that comes with it, that makes divorce so difficult. It's the expense of lawyers and the acrimony of court settlement, the picayune unraveling of bureaucratic detail. It's the difference between slapping a masher at a bar and filing against your boss for sexual harassment.
K pointed out, and I agree, that for gay and otherwise unmarried couples there really isn't a word that denotes the breaking of a long-term commitment; our friend, she said, was probably looking for a word that conveys that empty, shattered-life feeling, which "breakup" doesn't. I don't think that divorce is the right replacement, though, unless the marriage is a legal one. Married couples often break up long before the divorce -- they separate, divide their households, sometimes years before the divorce is actually final. Sometimes one partner runs out on the other, fleeing to Iowa, never to be heard from again. That separation is analagous to what happens at the end of a long-term unmarried commitment; the divorce is another thing, running in parallel, which can be awful in its own right.
I've been through two divorces (as an offspring, not a spouse), which probably explains why this twigged me. Even if the marriage is horrible -- even if you're delighted to be leaving this person, looking forward to a life alone, as my mom was after her second marriage -- the legal aspects of the divorce can still suck you down into a bleak morass of depression for months. That's not true if, as far as the state is concerned, you can just walk away.
What do y'all think?
