МИСЛЕЊЕ
The absurdity of the marriage proposal and of what follows it
T
imes are changing. People are on the streets, all over the world, protesting in huge numbers against a racist structure that unfairly gives people different life opportunities and life threats according to their skin color. Since 2017, the #MeToo movement connected millions of people across the globe against sexual harassment and assault, leading them to speak up about their share of the suffering of this kind of violence. Supreme courts worldwide are being asked to pass bills against all sorts of discrimination against LGBTI+ people - and passing them. Though it is mistaken to make generalizations, since there is still quite a bit of resistance and even indifference to these themes, we can arguably say that we are growing more and more aware of the historical cleavages that divide us, favoring some and oppressing others, and also becoming less and less collectively tolerant about them. This is fabulous and we should celebrate it. However, we cannot be naive or innocently confident about it - there are still many imbalances in place that must be broken, there is still much to fight for. Today, I would like to reflect on one of these “little” injustices of our Western social life that are not often in the limelight. The symbols of the marriage proposal and the ceremony after it. For, when a man gets down on his knees, offers a ring in
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a velvet box to his darling chosen one, and pops up the famous “will you marry me?” or one of its variants, isn’t it the perfect scene of happiness that promises a brilliant conjugal future? And when a bride, in virginal white and veil, walks the church or hall’s corridor in the arm of her father towards her about-to-be-husband, isn’t this the embodied image of how to commemorate a proper ritual of passage to such a happy conjugal future? Well, maybe it was for our grandparents, but it definitely isn’t for me and I dare say it isn’t for you either. Because the marriage proposal, from one party to another, reserves the initiative of the question for the first and the reaction of the answer to the other, in a very asymmetric active-passive relationship- that, presumably, nobody these days wants to actually live in the course of life together in the relationship itself. And because the walk down the aisle, where the bride leaves the arm of the man who accompanied her thus far to the arm of the one with whom supposedly she will spend her life from then on, puts her in a position of the object, if not propriety, of men, almost like in a transfer of a car in a contract, from one owner to the next. As if she wasn’t an autonomous individual, sovereign of her life, deciding of her own will and in a consensual agreement to join her path with that of this other autonomous individual, sovereign of his life - her equal in every sense.
