Tomorrow, I will be married.

Tomorrow, June 22, 2018, I will marry Charles Chabetaye Dabah. I will take him as my partner in marriage. 

Charles and me in June 2017 when we decided to get married.

I have struggled long and hard with the concept of marriage, with the idea of being a wife and having a husband. While that is not the language we choose for ourselves, those are the loaded terms that society will now assign to us. 

I have so much internalized baggage. Since I was a young girl, I’ve always felt I had to prove myself.  To be strong and to keep up with the boys. And at the same time, to be soft and weak, a damsel in distress for some man to swoop in and save me. For years, even though my parents celebrated my intellect and the kind of person I was in the world, I still measured my worth based on if boys were attracted to me. 

I have many fears about being married, chief among them is that I will suddenly become a 1950s house wife. (I have tremendous respect for women who make it their full-time job to care for their families and household because that is full-time, often thankless, definitely undervalued work…, but right now that is not a path that appeals to me.) I fear that I will become domesticated and leave the public arena. I fear not being able to achieve what others expect of me as a married woman, even if I reject their expectations. I fear that getting married will make me weak, dependent on a man for financial and emotional support, a signal to the outside world that I cannot survive on my own. I fear that marriage means I need a man and that that makes me weak, that I am failing to be a strong woman. I fear that I’ve tricked Charles into loving me, that someday he will wake up and be disgusted by me.

My fears are rooted in a culture of toxic masculinity, misogyny, patriarchy and sexism. A culture that celebrates toughness and admonishes vulnerability. A culture that values physical strength not emotional intelligence. A culture that values rugged individualism and rejects connections and interdependence. A culture that says love is weak.  

That is not a culture that I want to contribute to. Instead, I have come to see that loving Charles, and loving anyone for that matter, is one of the boldest, strongest, bravest things I can do. It requires such an extreme level of vulnerability. To love that which you could, and definitely will someday, lose. To let yourself be loved in return and to trust that you are worthy of love. These are incredibly fierce acts. Looking at marriage through that lens, it becomes, for me, an act of strength, not an admission of weakness.

I love doing what is not expected of me. And so for many years I rebelled against the idea of getting married. It’s the assumed path for many women, especially white, middle-class women. But recent comments suggest that perhaps by getting married, I am actually doing what is not expected of me – me as a feminist, an organizer in the movement. One younger female organizer was excited for me and proclaimed a how big a deal it is when someone in the movement gets married. Another woman asked if people were surprised I’m getting married because she sees me as a fierce feminist who doesn’t need the institution of marriage. 

And perhaps that is what is most exciting to me. I don’t need marriage, but I am actively choosing marriage. Choosing to create a legally and religiously recognized partnership. I want to queer up our marriage. We get to make it what we want it to be. While there are many rules that govern the institution of marriage, I also know that rules are meant to be broken. And in reality, there are no rules.  I am excited to transform the expectations of the institution of marriage from the inside.

As I’ve wrestled with this decision, I have come to these conclusions: I can still be fierce while loving others and letting myself be loved. In fact, those acts make me fierce. I have come to see that love, that unconditional love, makes me more able to go out every day and contribute to the movement for justice and fairness. It gives me strength and makes me more able to bring more joy into this world. 

I hope to be a role model for other women and I hope that our relationship will serve as a role model for other couples. I am deeply grateful for the role models for loving relationships that I've had  and for the many people who work to redefine the roles of wife, husband and the institution of marriage.  I hope that we will model respect, compassion, bravery and courage. I hope we will model that loving is fierce. I hope to show that loving relationships are not what Hollywood portrays, they are not “happily ever after,” but rather they are work and they require dedication and investment. I love a good challenge and I think marriage will be one.