| Opinion: Marriage Is Not the Only Way to Commit |
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My partner and I recently relocated and, subsequently, have needed to provide our information to countless agents. One morning, I overheard my partner in a pre-appointment conversation with a physician's administrator, providing the required name, date of birth, our address, and our phone numbers. Then, as I turned to walk upstairs with my arms full of our books and papers, I noted a brief hesitation before I heard the word "single"-my partner's response to the question of our marital status. During the next few lines of dialogue, I was preoccupied with the uneasy feeling that still accompanies the adjective "single" when it is used to describe us. My attention refocused when I heard my name-my partner registering me as the emergency contact. I sighed, walked upstairs, and shook my head at the paradox of being, as Solot and Miller said it, "unmarried to each other." My partner and I embarked on the journey of "unmarried" partnership five years ago when we designed and participated in a commitment ceremony before sharing a home. There were many reasons for our decision, not least of which was that, as communication researchers, we believed in the power of communication to create our relational reality. Although there were challenges associated with remaining unmarried, those challenges faded into insignificance in the face of subsequent and seemingly ceaseless calls to explain ourselves. Perhaps because we are heterosexual, most people who meet us ask if we are married. Over time, we have come to use this moment to reveal one particular reason for our decision to participate in a commitment ceremony and not marry; specifically, we desired to stand in solidarity with all those who wish to marry but are being denied that right with ever-increasing legislation against same-sex marriage. We are part of what has been called the "marriage boycott." Without ignoring important questions within the LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender) community about whether or not to pursue state-sanctioned marriage, we decided to draw attention to the inequity we perceive. The brief essay you are reading is drawn from a longer research article that I published in February this year in the Southern Communication Journal.* SCJ is a research journal that publishes articles on a range of topics in the communication field. February's issue dealt specifically with commitment as a communication concept. I enjoy a committed yet "non-traditional" partnership and for many years I have taught college courses in interpersonal communication using textbooks that barely discuss my type of relationship. As a communication scholar, I am sensitive to the ways that language does not merely describe but makes reality, by legitimizing some stories and erasing others. Therefore, I felt compelled to submit a critical article that outlined how interpersonal communication research has failed to consider couples who do not fall into the categories of single, dating, engaged, and married. In my article, I analyzed five recent research articles about commitment and five top-selling interpersonal communication textbooks. My analysis investigated how same-sex couples and/or "unmarried" couples would (and could) be incorporated into the texts. It soon became obvious that the study of commitment is so closely tied to marriage and/or "pre-marriage" that it is very difficult to identify a single discussion of commitment that does not include marriage, either directly or indirectly. Mostly, this occurs because of sampling practices that recruit survey participants and ask them to classify whether they are "single, dating, engaged, or married." There are two consequences to this practice; (1) participants are excluded who do not categorize themselves and their relationships this way and (2) these categories are treated as objective variables that can then be correlated to other factors. One telling example of where such correlation has occurred is between levels of commitment and individuals' subjective well-being. Thus, it is claimed quite regularly that married individuals have higher levels of well-being than engaged, dating, or single folk. Although little argument can be made with the statistic (which is robust and replicable), very rarely do those who report this statistic consider that some increase in well-being may be attributed solely to the high social approval that accompanies the state of marriage. The stress that accompanies not fitting into the social order or being actively excluded from the institution of marriage is likewise ignored. As for the textbooks, although research articles represent the publication of new knowledge to a professional academic audience, it is through the college classroom that this knowledge becomes most directly distributed to the general public. The extent to which discussions of diversity and social justice are able to enter the interpersonal communication classroom depends, in part, on the textbook that is assigned. In most cases, the interpersonal communication classroom may be the only time that students get to learn about personal relationships and research. When their textbooks do not consider the diverse ways in which relationships can be experienced, students may be persuaded that only the majority, the "traditional," the "normal" relationships count. After my critical analysis, it appears that all the textbook authors I reviewed are at least aware of the importance of inclusiveness when it comes to acknowledging a variety of relationship types and experiences; however, I argue that it is not sufficient to merely substitute terms (for example "partners" for "spouses") without critical discussions about relational diversity. It was also clear from my analysis that direct discussions about the experiences of those outside the canonical story of relationships were relatively rare among most of these texts. The absence of such references may simply reflect the limitations of the field rather than the authors. At the same time, I believe that textbook authors have more freedom to interpret and critique research than they typically exercise. In the same way that we are moving towards a fuller understanding of race and culture in our discussions of relationships, scholars must begin to incorporate the consideration of sexuality and relationship diversity into our research, textbooks, and teaching. In the story that introduced this article, the administrator at the physician's office needed to know our marital status for legal reasons. There is certainly a different implication when the question of marriage is raised in a social setting, and yet both examples illustrate the desire to classify. By classifying relationships as single-dating-engaged-married, we make sense of them but we also create a hierarchy with marriage (heterosexual, middle-class, monogamous) at the top and "casually dating" or "single" at the bottom. The classification system prevents the stories of individuals and couples from penetrating the prevailing social consciousness with their own experiences, beliefs, practices, and values. Whatever does not fit into the sanctioned classification system will likely either be ignored or miscategorized-a process that perpetrates a kind of discursive violence, because it denies individuals the power to define their own identities and relationship to the social order. As a scholar and teacher of interpersonal communication, I am increasingly sensitive to the lack of inclusiveness within our research articles and, subsequently, our interpersonal communication textbooks. Amid the hostile political debate that surrounds the extension of equal marriage rights to same-sex couples, I believe that, as experts in communication and relationships, we could do more to examine how we contribute to heterocentric worldviews, and to explicitly criticize the inequities of our social system rather than reinscribe the heterosexist assumptions that support them. I also hope that individuals, whether they fit neatly within the categories or not, will insist on a fill-in-the-blank option rather than a check-the-box: single-dating-engaged-married? * Foster, Elissa (2008). Commitment, communication, and contending with heteronormativity: An invitation greater reflexivity in interpersonal research. Southern Communication Journal, 73, 84-101. Elissa Foster (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is a Medical Educator with joint appointments in Family Medicine and the Division of Education at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown, PA. Her research focus is health communication and interpersonal relationships with a specialization in end-of-life communication. Her book is titled "Communicating at the end of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane" (Erlbaum, 2007). Examples of her research can be found in Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Ageing and Identity, Women's Studies in Communication, and the Southern Communication Journal. |
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