At what point does a couple become simply a couple in marriage?

Now there are certainly prob­lems in many marriages occur­ring between same-​​sex couples that occur because of outside hate­ful­ness. But from what I’ve seen, marital prob­lems with same-​​sex couples follow fairly predictable lines.

1. People are different. It’s some­times hard to agree on things.
2. People have fail­ings. No way around that.
3. People get sick or tired and part­ners have to step up. It’s not always graceful.
4. People lose jobs and parents and chil­dren and life is diffi­cult. And you have to cope.

We need to be thinking about how to keep marriages of all kinds succeeding. One reason I advo­cate for public weddings is that we involve the commu­nity in the success of our marriages. Commu­ni­ties need stable rela­tion­ships. It’s in their best interest to support them.

On today’s NY Times Op-​​Ed Page a trans­sexual, Jennifer Finney Boylan, wrote about her marriage and it’s ability to with­stand the prob­lems that arose when she real­ized she needed to be living as, to become, who she felt she was: a woman. Her wife, she tells us, ulti­mately found that she loved the essen­tials of the person more than the phys­ical mani­fes­ta­tions of that person. They have gone on building a marriage between them.

And yet, the courts think they have the rights to decide (and differ­ently from state to state) whether they are married, whether they can inherit one another’s prop­erty should one spouse die, and whom they might marry should a partner die and the survivor decided to remarry.

Gender poli­tics are always confusing, but rarely more so than in marriage. And adding the trans-​​gender thing to it, seems to add to the confu­sion. I loved these two para­graphs from this morn­ings editorial:

Similar rulings have left couples in similar situ­a­tions in Florida, Ohio and Texas. A 1999 ruling in San Antonio, in Littleton v. Prange, deter­mined that marriage could be only between people with different chro­mo­somes. The result, of course, was that lesbian couples in that juris­dic­tion were then allowed to wed as long as one member of the couple had a Y chro­mo­some, which is the case with both trans­gen­dered male-​​to-​​females and people born with condi­tions like androgen insen­si­tivity syndrome. This ruling made Texas, para­dox­i­cally, one of the first states in which gay marriage was legal.

A lawyer for the trans­gen­dered plain­tiff in the Littleton case noted the absur­dity of the country’s gender laws as they pertain to marriage: “Taking this situ­a­tion to its logical conclu­sion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Tex., is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Tex., and enters federal prop­erty, she is female and a widow; upon trav­eling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohib­ited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

Tip: Here’s the truth. Marriage is compli­cated. We need to spend our time getting people ready for healthy and happy marriage and then finding ways to keep them in those marriages. Our chil­dren will do better. Our society and our commu­ni­ties will do better. Let’s here it for making marriages stronger. Let’s stop worrying about who’s in the marriage and start worrying about how they’re making it work.