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" Hairpin writer Jia Tolentino has a bone to pick with the year 2013, for it was the year she attended 18 weddings. She writes that &amp;quot;18 weddings is so many weddings that the words start to shift in meaning. Eighteen is now an adjective that means too many. Wedding, a noun that means too much.&amp;quot; What follows is a self-indulgent critique of the institution of marriage, the tradition of weddings, and the women who want to become wives. Though it&amp;#039;s difficult to draw one conclusion from her arguments, which make hairpin (yes, went there) turns at nearly every paragraph, there is this: 18 women, 18 brides. 18 capable, wonderful, educated, privileged, professional, socially aware female humans enthusiastically plunging into an institution that holds about as much interest for me as a bag of playground rocks (some! Not much, though) and whose associated totems have historically represented the diminishment and commodification of a gender that needs to get more of either as much as we need a swift punch in the face. I understand easily why a man would want a wife; it&amp;#039;s harder to for me to grasp why a woman would want to be one. The language and semiotics of marriage are terrible: we&amp;#039;re still proposed to, our cervical fealty insured by a ring, our fathers give us away to our fuck buddies, we erase and replace our own names. The preferred aesthetic for &amp;quot;bride&amp;quot; is still very close to that of &amp;quot;princess,&amp;quot; a role so passive and empty that there&amp;#039;s not even anything there to subvert. I&amp;#039;m getting married next summer. According to Tolentino, this means I am diminishing myself as a woman, and turning myself into someone who can be bought with a diamond ring. But here&amp;#039;s the thing: I&amp;#039;m not marrying my fiance because he gave me a ring or because I want to dress and act like a thoughtless, trussed-up princess for a day. I&amp;#039;m marrying him because marriage is a meaningful and incredibly worthwhile demonstration of our love for one another. It is also a demonstration of our desire to live out our lives and raise children together. The wedding that kicks it off allows us to celebrate our union with our closest friends and family \u2014 something that&amp;#039;s as important to many of our loved ones as it is to us. Of course we want to show our guests a nice weekend that shows how much we care about not only each other, but also them. But what really troubles me about Tolentino&amp;#039;s post is that to assume marriage represents societal repression is to assume a pervasive helplessness among women. Marriage is no longer a retro institution that leaves women sitting around doing housework and feeding the children while a man goes off and earns all the money and enjoys all the world&amp;#039;s viable intellectual stimulation. Women are anything but feeble Betty Drapers these days. We may not be fully equal to men in some unfortunate ways (we still don&amp;#039;t earn a full dollar to theirs), but we certainly haven&amp;#039;t given up the fight and are even making awesome strides: women now earn more college degrees than men and are close to overtaking men as the primary breadwinners in their households. My fiance and I are equals in our relationship, and that won&amp;#039;t disappear the second we say &amp;quot;I do.&amp;quot; I work just as much as does, and I know that when we have children, he&amp;#039;ll be an equal caretaker in the relationship. When faced with choosing a city to live in after he finished graduate school, we picked New York because it offers the best opportunities for my career. I have to wonder how Tolentino would respond to gay activists who have been fighting for decades for this country to give them the same legal recognition as heterosexual couples, or who rush to the steps of city hall the moment their state legalizes gay marriage. Marriage is many things: it is work, it is commitment, it is even a tax break. But most important, it&amp;#039;s one way to make a life more meaningful. The choice to marry and have a fun traditional wedding to inaugurate it hardly undoes the work of the feminist or post-feminist movements. Indeed, I would argue that it strengthens it \u2014 women marrying today know that marriage won&amp;#039;t subvert them. It&amp;#039;s dangerous to turn a fear of commitment into an argument that it does.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a5273/stop-judging-marrying-women/?src=rss>