Its a pleasure to see a lawyer talking about alternatives to marriage and the inevitable pain, our fucked up divorce laws bring with it.
“When I was a child,” Diana Adams began, “I had a
dollhouse and a rich fantasy life. I imagined that I was a cancer-curing surgeon, a world-class ballerina, and a TV show host all at the same time. I was also an amazing mom to all my dolls, but it was always a little mysterious about where they had come from and whether they all had the same father. A little neighbor boy once said to me, ‘I’ll be the daddy.’ I thought about that for a moment. I said, ‘No, you can be my gay lounge singer friend. That’s much more fun.’ I’ve always liked boys. I just like them better in groups.”Over the years, the aspiring ballerina/surgeon/TV host shifted her focus to law. As a lawyer, Adams now runs a Brooklyn-based legal firm oriented toward providing traditional marriage rights to non-traditional families like the one she imagined as a kid. As an openly polyamorous woman, Diana lives inside a version of that dollhouse today. Along with her primary partner Ed, she is currently romantically involved with several other men and women.
As I have repeatedly stated here-marriage is indeed an outmoded institution that needs to go away. And more importantly-the nuclear family construct is about 30 years behind the times:
Our laws are about 20 years behind what families actually look like. I’m working to create alternatives to marriage, because I think that if we could choose marriage affirmatively instead of it being a default, it would make relationships stronger. Marriage is an incredibly intense contract. It’s a legal-financial contract that you’re making, declaring that you’re going to be the other person’s social welfare state and safety net if they screw up. I mean, you’re signing the most important document you’ll sign in your life and people read it less carefully than a cell phone contract. People have no idea what they’re actually committing to and are horrified a lot of times when they find out.
Yup! Been there-got the T-shirt.
But there are alternatives:
What kinds of alternatives to marriage are available?
There are different options. Domestic partnership, for example, has tremendous possibility to create a more expansive version of what a relationship can look like. Domestic partnership was originally created as an alternative for gay couples who couldn’t legally get married. But then, all these surprising things started happening where these other kinds of people started using it for their own purposes. For instance, many elderly widow friends have entered into platonic domestic partnerships. It’s a situation like the Golden Girls. These are friends saying, “I live with her, and we watch out for each other, and I want her to be the person I can share my health insurance with.”