The History of Marriage
& Making it ours
Our Love as Reclamation
The word "marriage" carries with it a lot of baggage and the institution, ugly history that has harmed a lot of people. We believe it is important to name that history so we can separate what marriage means to us, from the heaviness it holds when embarked on without consideration.
Unconscious reproduction of oppressive patterns continues the oppression even when the legal or social structures have changed. Conscious refusal at the level of the self interrupts it.
Our Love is not Currency
Love itself has been co-opted and marketed to support a system designed as a legal and social institution used with remarkable consistency across cultures and centuries to organize and enforce women's subordination, and to create unhealthy relational patterns in men.
It has functioned as one of the primary mechanisms through which women's autonomy, labor, sexuality, and legal personhood have been controlled, and under English common law, which shaped law throughout the British Empire and early United States, marriage legally dissolved a woman's independent existence.
As we know, for most of history, women had few or no legal rights to property, education, or paid work and marriage supported that. Marriage was often not really a choice in any meaningful sense, it was the only available path to economic survival. A woman who remained unmarried faced poverty, social stigma, and profound vulnerability.
Our Love Does Not Define Our Worth
Feminist scholars Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, and later Adrienne Rich argued that marriage didn't just restrict women legally and economically but strongly shaped their inner lives. De Beauvoir argued in The Second Sex that marriage asked women to make a fundamental psychological surrender, to define themselves as wife and mother rather than as independent subjects.
Women of today can confirm that we’ve been socialized, across centuries and reinforced through every cultural medium, to understand our value as contingent on being chosen. Marriage wasn't just an economic necessity, it was the primary metric of a woman's worth.
This creates belief that you are lovable, complete, or successful only when confirmed by a partner's selection of you. Many women marry in blind pursuit of this inherited belief system.
This socialization isn’t just harmful for individual women, it’s harmful for the relationship as a whole. When your worth feels dependent on being chosen, the relationship stops being a place where two already-whole people connect. It becomes a place where you go to become whole. That's an enormous amount of pressure to place on a partnership, and it fundamentally distorts the relational dynamic before it even begins. You're not asking "is this person good for me?" You're asking "will this person save me?"
Our Love is not a Response to What Others Need
We are doing this not because the law requires us to, not because our families expect it, not because there is a script we're opting to follow, but because we have looked at each other clearly and chosen this deliberately as a choice that uplifts each of us as individuals.
Self-silencing as a relational strategy
When researching the negative impacts of marriage on couples, Brie came across Dana Jack's research on depression in women, which introduced the concept of self-silencing as the pattern of suppressing one's own thoughts, feelings, needs, and judgments in order to maintain a relationship and avoid conflict. Jack’s work found that self-silencing was strongly correlated with depression in women, and that it operated as a kind of internalized moral code: a "good" wife or partner is one who puts the relationship first, who doesn't make demands, and who manages the emotional climate of the household.
This is a direct descendant of centuries of socialization. Women were trained to subordinate their needs to their husband's. That training doesn't disappear when the laws change. It gets internalized and reproduced in the psychology of subsequent generations through modeling, messaging, and the subtle rewards and punishments that shape behavior long before a child can articulate what she's learning.
The paradox of self-silencing is that it destroys the very intimacy it's meant to protect. Genuine intimacy requires two actual people. Two people with real desires, disagreements, and interior lives who choose each other across that difference. When one person effaces herself to preserve the relationship, the other person ends up in a relationship with a performance, not a person. The silenced partner feels unseen and resentful while the other partner often feels vaguely lonely without knowing why.
We Intend to Not Lose Ourselves
Related to this is what family systems therapist Murray Bowen (Learned through the podcast Reimagining Love) called differentiation of self. The capacity to maintain a clear sense of your own identity, values, and emotional experience while in close connection with another person. Undifferentiated people tend to either fuse (losing themselves in the relationship) or cut off (maintaining distance to preserve a fragile sense of self).
Under-differentiated relationships are prone to a particular kind of suffering such as resentment that can't be named because the person has lost access to the self that has needs or conflict that feels catastrophic because the relationship has become the self, as well as a paradoxical loss of desire and connection. This is because sustained intimacy requires two distinct people.
When marriage is framed as an achievement with a ticking clock, the psychology of partner selection gets distorted. Researchers have documented how women under social pressure to marry tend to rationalize and accommodate partners who don't actually meet their needs, telling themselves that love will develop, that they can change them, that their own doubts are irrational.
This is a rational response to an irrational social structure. When the cost of not partnering feels existential, staying in an inadequate relationship feels safer than the terrifying alternative of being alone and unchosen. The result is that many women enter long-term commitments with partners who are fundamentally incompatible with their actual needs, then spend years trying to make those partnerships work through force of will and emotional labor.
Same Sex Relationships are Not Exempt
This social programming doesn't only operate in heterosexual couples. It operates in any woman (or man- from the opposite perspective) raised in a culture that delivers those messages, which is essentially anyone raised in this culture. Same-sex relationships are in no way exempt from recreating the same dynamics that make heterosexual marriage oppressive. The same patterns can reproduce themselves between two women, because they live inside the individuals, not just in the institutional structure.
We Are Aware and Intend to do The Work
Healthy intimate relationships require two differentiated people who can be both connected and autonomous. They require the ability to voice needs and tolerate the vulnerability of conflict. They lean on mutual care void of self-erasure, as well as a sense of inherent worth that doesn't depend on the relationship for its foundation.
All of that runs directly counter to what marriage as an institution has historically demanded of women, and counter to how women have been socialized to understand themselves in relation to love. The work of building genuinely healthy relationships for women shaped by this history, often involves a kind of active excavation. It asks of us to distinguish between what we actually want and what we’ve been trained to want; to understand the difference between genuine love and the relief of being chosen, or the difference between intimacy and codependency.
That excavation is genuinely hard, partly because the socialization runs deep, and partly because the cultural messaging hasn't stopped, it's just gotten subtler. But it's also where some of the most meaningful personal growth happens, because the same patterns that make relationships painful tend to be the ones that are most ready to change.
So what about marriage is appealing to two women who don’t fit the bill for what the system had in mind?
Two women marrying on their own terms, in full knowledge of the institution's history, consciously having hard and uncomfortable conversations, doing the work to resist programming in pursuit of something healthy and under the full uninhibited expression of what it means to choose joy, is itself a form of resistance.
This insistence, held publicly, is radical in the oldest sense of the word: it goes to the root of things and proposes something different growing there.
When two women stand up and say this — this love between us — is what we are publicly committing to, they are reclaiming something that was deliberately suppressed. They are saying that their love is not auxiliary. It is not a supplement to the real thing. It is the real thing, and it is worth the full weight of public witness and legal recognition.