Originally posted on greenfairydotcom

Jennifer Lopez. No, don't snigger. This post is being filed in my 'sanity' category rather than in 'idiocy' - I approve of this deliciously nasty third wedding.

Lopez's third and probably over within a year marriage - like Britney Spears' Las Vegas debacle - is fantastic, because it's simply so dismissive and undermining of the insitution. If Bush and co. want to really get their knickers in a twist about the sanctity of marriage being destoyed, they might want to look beyond the unholy, insidious homosexeual agenda and realise what's being done to it by the blessed heterosexual couples treating it as a joke. Though I can no more imagine any tighter restrictions on straight marriages than I can on the having of children. Both situations better than the horrendous, heathen alternatives, no?

I'd marry at the drop of a hat. For citizenship, for money, for fun, for someone to come round right now with some air conditioning. I hold the insitution in no regard whatsoever. In fact, I think I'd quite like to be able to refer to myself as a divorcee. Decree Nisis should come with a guide to growing a pencil moustache for men and a floor length negligee and tortoiseshell cigarette holder for women. But I digress.

I am sure it's perfectly possible for two people to marry and live out the rest of their lives together all the happier for being married. But while this may be something that if you are of a certain disposition you might consider aspiring to, and despite the considerable evidence of the failure of this ambition for many, it does not mean it should not be available and celebrated for those who want it. However marriage is still universally pushed as the ideal, the goal all relationships should work towards, the pinnacle of a healthy, mature union, regardless of the fact that monumental shifts in perceptions and attitudes towards the nature and execution of relationships and gender roles means it is simply not appropriate for or desired by many. But if you've never felt the need, well, mustn't there be something missing? It's better if you've tried and it's fucked up, because at least then you've attemptied to achieve this all-approved state of grace. When Lopez is sixty I am sure she will be treated more kindly for a string of failed marriages than she would be if she'd chosen never to.

Desperately tempting as it is to speculate whether she has some peculiar issues regarding self-worth or she just cannot tell the difference between infatuation and love (though surely if it's the latter by now something must be beginning to dawn?), the interest for me remains firmly in this delicious disregard for the conventional message, made all the more mouth watering by its genuine cloak of acquiescence. Every new time she says 'I do' she lessens the grasp that state and religion has over love, so I stand up and applaud.

Comments