In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

>> 165 6 Making It Personal Marriage, Emotion, and Love inside and outside the Law We married aware that, as a married couple, we would still be denied the rights, privileges, and benefits of marriage according to others, so why did we do it? . . . We are honored that by marrying we were making a statement for civil rights, but we married out of plain old-fashioned love. —Carolyn and Mona, San Francisco At first glance it might seem absurd that in a book about marriage, only one chapter is dedicated to discussion of love and romance. After all, as a number of couples poignantly point out, what other reason is there to marry? The old saying that “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage,” however trite, certainly holds true for a great number of couples, whether gay or straight. At the same time, this is not—and cannot be—the end of the story. The simplicity of the formulation belies the inherent complexity of the particular historical moment in which these marriages occurred, and the convoluted intersection of law and love—the political and the personal—that they represent. In the simplest terms, the fact that same-sex couples have not had the option to marry—and still do not in most states—necessitates a different approach. That the status of their romantic lives is a topic of political and legal debate at all places them in a unique position, one occupied most conspicuously in the past by interracial couples and, to a lesser degree, the incarcerated. The law and the culture—to the extent that those two things are distinct—have 166 > 167 points out, law and emotion may intersect in a number of ways: law can “express or reflect [emotions], channel them, script them, cultivate them, and destroy them.”5 There have as of yet been no scholarly accounts of the way emotional and legal concerns come together for same-sex couples themselves. The closest to explore this intersection would be Cheshire Calhoun’s “Making Up Emotional People,” which, rather, focuses on (presumably false) cultural and legal constructions of same-sex couples’ emotions—in particular romantic love—which are used to justify bans on same-sex marriage.6 The work of Kathryn Abrams and Hila Keren provides most likely the best model for thinking about how law and emotions are intertwined in the context of same-sex marriage. A primary departure in their work is its focus on positive emotions, such as love and hope, as distinguished from most prior research, which largely focused on negative emotions such as disgust or shame. Abrams points out that it is these emotions— often associated with the feminine—that encounter the most resistance in their intersection with the law (and more so when applied in the arena of family law), because there is a perception that the law (often gendered male) may be a corrupting or profane influence. In a separate work, she and Keren focus on the law’s role in cultivating emotions—in particular, hope.7 Although the particular empirical referents they use to study this (including the enactment of Project Head Start as part of the 1960s War on Poverty) do not involve family law, several of their observations provide foundations on which to think about the affective dimensions of law in the context of same-sex marriage. First, they point out that—far from isolating themselves from the personal—institutions (and legal institutions specifically) may be potent forces in cultivating emotions like hope, because of their rhetorical power and breadth, by encouraging particular ways of thinking to a broad constituency. This constitutes an implicit rejection of the common assertion that legal “rationality” and “the passions” are mutually exclusive. They also underscore the sustained social benefits that such cultivation can produce on a broader scale, in that its direct beneficiaries can then become forces for independently furthering the social change sought. Finally, 168 > 169 a low of 2.01 for the reason that they “did it on a whim” to 4.42 for the answer that they married “for romantic and emotional reasons and/or to show my love for my partner.” In fact, these two items were, respectively , the lowest and highest rated motivations overall on the entire survey. In other words, the most consistently cited “most important” reason for entering a legal marriage had nothing to do with the law: that of love and romance. This theme was consistent across demographic categories: young and...

Share