London filmmaker Grace Gelder has just lent a helping hand to Dave’s noble drive towards broadening the concept of marriage.
An expansion was self-evidently necessary. Anyone could see that insistence on the outdated notion of marriage as a union between one (1) man and one (1) woman was out of keeping with the inclusive spirit of modernity.
We live to be happy, don’t we? Everyone knows there can be no other purpose to life.
Hence anything that adds to the sum total of human happiness must be welcomed, and anything that subtracts from it must be resisted. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
Marriage used to be regarded as a necessary condition for the survival of the human race, but that, we now know, was wrong. Marriage is all about happiness, although some of my married friends may disagree.
Who are we then to prevent two homosexual persons, male, female or other, from tying the knot? Such obduracy would be judgemental, and that’s among the worst things either an individual or a society can be.
God (who definitely doesn’t exist) save us from passing moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgement. A propensity for doing so would mark us out as pariahs in our brave, new, all-inclusive world, especially if we cling to the frankly fascist view that some judgements just may be better than others.
We’d be known as elitists and classists (I’ve just come across this neologism in a newspaper, making me wonder how we’ve ever managed without it so far). Even worse, we’d carry the stigma of being survivals of the past, whereof nothing deserves to survive.
Such progressive thoughts, I must admit, are new to me. At the time same-sex marriage became a reality, I still hadn’t abandoned my stale reactionary beliefs, which led me to indulge in shameful mockery.
Whatever next, I kept asking, in jest. Marriage between siblings? Parents and children? Different species? True enough, I sneered, such unions can’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce progeny, but then neither can a homosexual marriage. So, if being happy is all marriage is about, why can’t a man divorce his sister and then marry his father or, say, a borzoi?
I’m ashamed now of my sarcasm. Having realised the error of my ways, I’m prepared to accept all those variations on the theme of marriage as perfectly valid and indeed desirable, something not to satirise but to applaud.
Predictably, in my then jaundiced mood I shackled my imagination, not allowing myself to see the full range of nuptial possibilities. What is it called these days? Thinking outside the box?
Well, I not just thought inside the box but I nailed the lid shut. My sneering remarks were based on the assumption that any future expansion of matrimonial licence would still include two parties, irrespective of their sex, species or kinship.
My new heroine Grace Gelder has disabused me of this silly superstition. Having despaired of finding a suitable spouse, this comely young woman with long hair and a tasteful ring in her nostril has married herself.
Now, Oscar Wilde did say that falling in love with yourself is the beginning of a life-long romance, but he never realised that self-adoration could lead to self-marriage. His imagination was as hamstrung by tradition as mine was, even if his life wasn’t.
Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s imagination, on the other hand, soars free and, like all true pioneers, she lit up a path for others to follow.
Apparently her eye-opening Damascene experience came from the Bjork song Isobel which includes the lyric “I’m Isobel, married to myself”. Indirectly this again pointed out how hopelessly retrograde I am, for I’ve never even heard this or any other song by Bjork and – to my eternal shame – have no idea who Bjork is.
In everything other than the number of parties involved, the marriage was as traditional as they come.
Grace proposed to herself, presumably on bended knee, blushed, lowered her eyelashes and whispered ‘yes’. She then bought a ring, a wedding dress and a full stock of flowers, rice and confetti.
She then invited all her friends to the wedding, to be officiated by her recently ordained friend. None of the reports I’ve read specifies either the friend’s sex or the confession in which he/she/it is a celebrant. But on this evidence, our new-style Anglican Church is the likely candidate.
All in all, 50 guests came, which made Grace’s wedding better attended than any of mine. The invitees watched the ceremony proceed swimmingly, with the blushing bride/groom making two sets of vows, exchanging rings with herself, kissing a mirror reflection of herself (a nice touch, that) and tossing a bouquet over her head.
The reports also omitted the more intimate details of the wedding night, which lets one’s fantasies run riot – mostly in the direction of the objectionable phrase that starts with ‘go’ and ends with ‘yourself’.
Whatever the consummation method was, and whatever objects were used therein, it can elicit no moral objections outside the strictest interpretation of Catholic doctrine. The practice was after all sanctified by marriage.
Which brings me to another neologism, the one I used in the title. For the law has so far failed to recognise Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s marriage as valid.
This has led me to coin the word ‘couplism’, designating yet another flagrant violation of every principle modernity holds dear.
Who are we to insist that it takes two to marry? For one thing, this amounts to committing two other widespread crimes, those of racism and intolerance.
We seem to forget that millions of Brits live according to the law that allows up to four concurrent wives. This law is based on their religion, which is as at least as valid as anything else some of us may practise or, in the eyes of the law, even more so.
In fact, the Newcastle footballer Cheick Ismaël Tioté openly has two wives, and he continues to ply his trade with nary an interference. One can infer that our law no longer insists on a particular numerical makeup of wedlock.
Thus it is flagrant discrimination to accept a marriage of three but not of one. And, this side of fondling a woman’s breast without permission, no crime is worse than discrimination – even if it only involves preferring Bach to Bjork (whoever he/she is).
Down with couplism, I say. Let’s start a campaign, which I’m sure Dave will support, to recognise self-marriage – provided of course that such a hermaphroditic union makes the self-married person happy.
I remember a patriotic Soviet song that started with the words “We are born to make a fairytale come true.” Some clever chaps would replace the word skazku (the Russian for fairytale) with Kafku, with the line now saying “We are born to make Kafka come true.”
Now why do you suppose I suddenly recalled that line? Memory, like marriage, does work in mysterious ways.