NEWSMARRIAGE

Facebook allows us to write whatever we want in our profile's "Religion" box -- even Peanut Butter Cups. So why, for our "Relationship," must we choose from a pre-set list of nine choices: single; in a relationship; engaged; married; it's complicated; in an open relationship; widowed; separated; and divorced?

Facebook needs to make the Relationship status a write-in field. I at least want the option of flaunting of my relationships with my cat or my hairdresser. But there are serious, bigger problems at stake here.

By forcing users to choose one "relationship" from a narrow range of options centering around marital status and sexual habits, Facebook perpetuates our society's entrenched mate-mania, which over-worships the sexual-couple-unit, and marriage in particular. This bias devalues other important relationships. It devalues platonic friends and non-spousal family members. And it devalues people for whom conventional coupling/marriage is either not appealing or not an option.

Many of us have experienced this mate-mania in common discourse, such as the single person who weathers comments like "You're so awesome, why are you still single?" But most people don't realize that this irritating cultural quirk is actually codified into government policy. In the U.S. legal code over 1300 laws mention marital status, favoring married couples by a wide margin. People seldom question this blatant discrimination because they're brainwashed by the myth of marriage-as-panacaea, a myth encouraged by casually couple-centric phenomena like the Facebook Relationship Drop Down Menu of Doom.

There are two things our society tells women they need to be happy: beauty and a man.

In the extreme, this means women go under the knife, trying to make their bodies conform to our ridiculous beauty standards. A premium is placed on weddings and how the bride looks at the wedding. Feminists were horrified when these damaging obsessions became reality TV shows like The Swan and My Fair Wedding. Now, E! Entertainment has taken the next logical step and combined them into one massively-sexist show: Bridalplasty.

Brides-to-be compete in wedding-themed contests like writing vows, then the winner picks a desired surgery off her “wish list,” anything from a nose job to liposuction to breast implants. The husband-to-be does not get to see his surgically altered bride until she walks down the aisle. Each week a woman is voted off, so the audience gets to see women scheming and backstabbing, maybe even some cat-fights.

Here's a taste from Jezebel of the first episode: "The contestants had to race to finish a puzzle, by covering up their old 'gross' bodies with Photoshopped versions of themselves. The women who finished their puzzles in a timely fashion were allowed to attend an "injection party," where they would be able to get a bunch of fillers and Botox." The last woman to make it into the injection party wept for joy.

When a person gets married, they often want to share it with the world — or at least their city. So Laine Tadlock's decision to run a wedding announcement in her local paper, the State Journal-Register, seems like nothing out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, Michael Jones reports on Gay Rights that this particular wedding announcement cost her a job. Is her employer just really anti-marriage? Not exactly. The issue at stake was that she was getting married to another woman.

Her employer, the Catholic Benedictine University in Springfield, IL, was not pleased to discover that "here come the brides" was the name of the game at Tadlock's wedding. While Tadlock has been out about her sexual orientation since the beginning of her job, and many of her coworkers knew about the upcoming nuptials — and the sex of her intended — and had offered their congratulations, the higher-ups alerted to her plans via wedding announcement weren't so happy for her.

Tadlock was pushed to take early retirement, a move which would have allowed the University to save face, but she had no intention of helping them shove her out of a job over her marriage. So, effective October 28, Benedictine University went ahead and gave her the boot anyway, writing, "By publicizing the marriage ceremony in which she participated in Iowa she has significantly disregarded and flouted core religious beliefs which, as a Catholic institution, it is our mission to uphold."

Over the last few months, the BBC's Lucy Ash has been reporting on bride kidnapping in Chechnya, a longstanding tradition that, while illegal, continues to be a problem for women in the Russian republic.

When I mentioned the practice to my history-loving Scandinavian partner, he immediately recited anecdotes about Viking bride stealing, noting how common the raptio-esque tradition was in a variety of cultures. In the past, the practice was often linked to securing a place in a wealthy woman's family and had more to do with inheritance than sex or marriage. These days, in a place like Chechnya, men actually pay fines to the government whenever they're caught kidnapping a woman. Little deterrent for wealthy men, poor men "suffer" under this classist, patriarchal system, and by and large, women remain unprotected as they can still be snatched by men rich enough to essentially buy legal compliance.

Many countries consider bride kidnapping a form of sexual assault rather than valid marriage, and it's pretty obvious why. This arranged and forced marriage seems to have nothing to do with love or companionship. In recent years, thanks to unrest from Chechen battle for independence, there has been a marked surge in the rate of bride stealing once again, perhaps a way to hang onto any cultural relic available. As Ash reports, many in the region struggle with a way to make sense of what is right when presented with Chechen tradition, Islamic Sharia law, and Russian law. It's not an excuse as much as an explanation.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that my teachers had a personal life outside of the classroom. I'm not sure when exactly it dawned on me that, when three o'clock rolled around, the people who taught me to read and multiply stepped out to do their own thing, or when that recognition evolved into figuring out that this real life might include such activities as going to bars, drinking, dating, and even having sex. In New York City elementary schools, my favorite teachers were almost always unmarried young women who could reasonably be expected to do one or all of those things. Now that I know peers who teach youngsters, while also enjoying life as single young women, I have better insight into the probable lives of those cherished teachers. Reflecting on this as an adult, I'm glad their lives didn't revolve solely around bratty youngsters.

Of course, there's no reason why a kindergartner should know anything about a teacher's sex life. Whatever she did on her own time was certainly not a five-year-old's business. And whether or not my teacher was getting laid outside of marriage didn't impact her ability to teach me how to sound out words. Yet Republican Senator Jim DeMint thinks a woman's sex life has a significant bearing on her ability to teach. At a rally over the weekend, DeMint asserted that an "unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend ... shouldn't be in the classroom." He holds the same position on LGBTQ teachers: if they're openly homosexual, we can't let them near our children.

This statement by DeMint shouldn't come as a surprise, since he got into hot water over similar comments during his 2004 bid for Senate, when he said that gay individuals single, pregnant women living with their boyfriends should not be allowed in the classroom. When called out for his homophobia and attacks on single moms, he tried to backpedal without really apologizing, pulling the old "I shouldn't have said that" card rather than "what I said was wrong." Obviously, since he just said pretty much the exact same thing, he doesn't think it was wrong.

A lot of unhappily married couples have found that during the recession, sticking it out makes economic sense. But while divorce is expensive, hey, so are weddings. For the first time in more than a century, it looks like both are taking a hit, largely based on the terrible economy.

By analyzing the new Census Bureau data, the Population Reference Bureau has discovered that marriage rates are at their lowest recorded levels. The New York Times reports that some heterosexual couples are putting off marriage because their collective economic future seems too unstable to commit to anything else at the moment.

That seems fair enough, though I have to wonder: do you really need financial stability to fall and stay in love? It certainly helps, but isn't that a myopic view of relationships, legal or otherwise?

The study puts some of the marriage decline blame on gender equality, noting "that women's higher earning capacity, and the declining economic prospects of young men without a college degree, are key factors contributing to the decline in marriage in recent years." This may all be true, but as always, I'm troubled by language that women's economic equality should somehow be blamed for anything, particularly the decline of something — traditional marriage — that has also held women back.

If you are an unmarried cohabitating American without children, chances are your neighbors don't regard you as having a family. This is according to a New York Times article, which cites a survey by Indiana University sociology professor Brian Powell. The 2003, 2006, and 2010 survey found that "the majority of Americans" would call a cohabitating couple "family" if they were same-sex with children but not married, or same-sex without children but married. Yet the majority of survey respondents would not — perish the thought! — define a cohabitating gay or hetero couple as "family" if they were unmarried with no children.

The article headline? "Study Finds Wider View of Family" (bolded text is mine). Yes, it's wider because it includes long-overdue recognition of gay couples as family — well, of some gay couples. Not the couples who choose not to (or cannot) pursue the "traditional" relationship solidification routes of marriage and babies. And hetero couples who don't sign on the dotted line? Well, they don't count either.

Okay, so they're not a "family." So what? Is this just another one of the many inane, but relatively harmless, preconceived notion people have about unmarrieds? (Other fun facts about singles not supported by solid data include: single people have shorter lives, tend to be celibate/virgins/shy, and want a partner above all else.)

No. This cultural prejudice against non-nuclear families is a big problem, because it is institutionalized (see here and here)  in federal and state laws, disadvantaging unmarried and gay people. Those laws will never change unless the populace's prejudices do.

Happy Unmarried and Single Americans Week! This seven-day extravaganza honors singledom as a viable and respectable lifestyle. Although some pundits and dating websites try to co-opt the holiday into another excuse to "fix" singles by turning them into halves of couples, that was never the original purpose. So in honor of USA week, let's take on the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

FMLA privileges the conjugal heterosexual marital relationship, at the expense of not only gays but all unmarried and single people. If Martians read the Act, they would think that the only people who get sick in America are husbands, wives, children, and parents, because these are the people FMLA allows workers time off to care for, without risking their jobs.  (Here's what happens when non-nuclear loved ones fall ill.)

At the least, the FMLA should mirror the U.S. federal government's "care time," which says employees can leave their jobs temporarily to care for "any individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”

After the 111th Congress starts in January 2011, you can join the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) in petitioning our lawmakers to expand FMLA. For now, AtMP asks readers to share your experiences dealing with FMLA or similar state-sponsored leave programs.

Polygamy is having a moment. Anyone who has seen HBO's fictional account of a polygamous family, Big Love, knows this. Beyond the tube, several novels came out this year on the same topic: Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist and David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife. While fictitious accounts of life in a polygamous home might be more enthralling than real-life accounts, at least one sobering documentary, Sons of Perdition, has also been making the rounds in an attempt to shine some light on how the practice damages young people and rips apart families.

This fall, anyone with cable TV will be able to peer even further into the lives of a polygamous family on TLC's Sister Wives. Not wholly unlike Bill Paxton's character on Big Love, real life family man Kody Brown has three wives — Meri, Janelle, and Christine — and thirteen children. Brown's family, which hails from Utah, is known as Fundamentalist Mormon, a term used to describe small sects that adhere to older practices, such as polygamy, now banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. (Modern LDS members tend to object to Fundamentalist Mormons using the term "Mormon" due to that conflation of fringe polygamous groups with the mainstream church.)

The show begins with the family's decision to welcome a fourth wife, Robyn, who will bring three extra kids into the mix. Like other TLC shows of late, this one seems a bit more committed to playing up familial weirdness (a la Jon, Kate, and children) and religious fanaticism (a la breeding for God with the Duggars) than showcasing a family from which we can actually learn about alternative lifestyles. I hope I'll be wrong when the show premieres later this month, but it sure looks like a chance to fly one's freak flag rather than educate the masses about an already fairly misunderstood practice — and in this case, the margins of faith.

It's all over my news feed: young single women in urban areas now make more money than their single male counterparts. Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and numerous other outlets recently reported that unmarried, childfree women aged 22 to 30 earn eight percent more than men of equivalent status, according to the research firm Reach Advisors.

Partial yay!

Partial, because it would be nicer if the sexes earned the same amount. Young single women are more likely than the men to have attended college, putting them in a higher earning bracket, while at the same time less educated men are losing jobs due to the recession and associated "decimation of the manufacturing employment base" that previously provided them with well-paying jobs, according to USA Today.

So let's not break out the champagne yet. Single, young, childfree urban women, while an important demographic, are only one slice of the female populace, a populace that overall still earns far less than men. Single women -- not necessarily of the young, childfree, urban persuasion -- still earn less than married women. They still suffer particularly hard from the recession, as reported by Afro and The Huffington Post, in part because government and commerce perpetuate policies that force singles to subsidize married people, and also because the gender gap tends to hit harder on women of all ages who do not have a (normally higher-earning) male's income to fall back on. Women of color, who statistically and historically speaking start from a baseline of less privilege, feel the gap more acutely and have the most to gain from its obliteration.