By Jaclyn Geller

Because I am a junior professor, you can typically find me in my office, staring at to-do lists and worrying about money.

Picture my office in West Hartford, Connecticut: there's a computer, an overstuffed filing cabinet, and dozens of reference books. Two large bulletin boards display an assortment of personal and professional documents: my course syllabi, an academic calendar, pictures of my favorite authors: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Alexander Pope, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Frost. Next to a quote from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice ("A lady's Imagination is very rapid: it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.") is a list of names scribbled in black ink on lined white paper: Adam and Karen. Jimmy and Susan. Paul and Laura. David and Suzanne.

The Couples To Whom I Owe Wedding Gifts. I have attended their weddings and should purchase gifts for them when I can afford to do so.

Today I am struck by a delightful, practical, subversive idea. It's the logical conclusion of writing a book, getting an overwhelming response, making a great discovery, and attending lots of weddings. Let me share my thought process with you.

My past few years have been intense and gratifying. I completed my doctoral thesis on the subject of eighteenth-century British marriage satire. I began to question, privately, the ideals that underpin such cultural practices as bridal showers, bachelor parties, lavish wedding celebrations, and honeymoons. I met a like-minded editor at a pro-choice event, and we spent the evening sharing our dismay at our culture's widespread and seemingly univocal celebration of heterosexual marriage. A book contract quickly followed. In 2001, I published Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, a satiric commentary/feminist analysis of the big white wedding phenomenon in America.

The book enjoyed a small print run. My editor, Kathryn Belden, and I felt that the academic nature of the writing, as well as the book's critical position on marriage, would limit it to a small audience.

We were wrong. Although sales were modest, Here Comes the Bride was a Barnes and Noble selected nonfiction title for 2001 and was posted online by Dial-a-Book in its Publishers' Weekly Program. It was reviewed widely and featured in national magazines and periodicals. I was startled to be invited to speak on National Public Radio and to be interviewed on local radio and television programs. It seemed there was a hunger to hear someone take a shot at the seemingly invulnerable wedding industry and all that it stands for.

Among other things, the wedding industry mandates that we give gifts to marrying couples who are already swimming in stuff. I have watched many of the people in my life couple off and become engaged. Most say they are marrying to have children; others say that they have fallen in love or feel the need to make a commitment. All describe the decision in highly personal terms -- terms that, I think, elide a significant political reality: when a couple marries, its members receive serious material rewards. A trapdoor opens and money and house-wares fall through. For the accidentally or deliberately unmarried there is no trapdoor: no linens, cookware, china, and cash.

In Jane Austen's day -- late eighteenth-century England -- the financial rewards of wedlock were palpable. As her novels demonstrate, unmarried female poverty was a great incentive to wedlock: a woman's "imagination" could be engaged by the dual fantasy of a solvent home and the prince charming who provided that abode. In early twenty-first century America, when the cost of living is at an unprecedented high, marital entitlement is a powerful incentive to sexual conformity. And when we purchase bridal shower presents and wedding gifts on cue, often for those to whom we are not particularly close, we perpetuate this system of reward and punishment, supporting a recession-proof, $70-billion-a-year industry.

Because of my book and media appearances, I received grateful letters and e-mails from around the country. Reading these missives, six years later, is still an emotional experience for me. A young married woman from Westerville, Ohio, wrote, sadly, "I wanted children and to be a teacher at a time when unmarried mothers still had difficulty in that field. And I had a wedding to please my mother." A male, Washington, DC-based nonprofit administrator wrote, "This pressure to couple and live happily ever after is no less noxious than racism or homophobia...but unlike those isms, it goes largely unchecked." A graduate of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, wrote and characterized her alma mater as "more of a marriage factory than a school." She described the marriage-pressure as so intense that graduating female seniors who lack fiancés sometimes purchase their own cheap diamond rings and fabricate nonexistent engagements. She concluded, describing her own partner, "As much as I love him, I will not marry him."

It seemed that I had hit the tip of an enormous iceberg. There were myriad men and women throughout the country who were questioning, challenging, critiquing, opposing, or working to drastically reform, the institution of marriage. But was there an organization that served as a clearinghouse for these efforts?

One of the most exciting responses to my book was an e-mail from Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot, introducing themselves and inviting me to become part of the Alternatives to Marriage Project.

I was thrilled to discover AtMP. Its very existence signals a change in the air.

While our present government seems determined to anesthetize Americans into a nostalgic stupor, the American household is diversifying. There are those who choose to live monogamously with a single partner but who do not want the government's seal of approval on their sexual activity with that partner. Others opt for rich, celibate lives, others for non-monogamous partnerships, others for the option of living communally with friends. With ever-increasing life expectancies, it is possible to desire different setups at different phases of one's life, without being locked into the "until death do us part" contract, and without suffering the stigmatization and financial penalties of breaking this contract. The Alternatives to Marriage Project represents all of these choices; it gives each of these individuals a voice.

I glance, once again, at the list of names on my bulletin board: Adam and Karen. Jimmy and Susan. Paul and Laura. David and Suzanne. All of these people have well-outfitted homes: none needs a set of wine glasses or a food processor or a soup tureen. But if any of the children of these unions are non-monogamous, unconventionally partnered, or nonpartnered, they will need the Alternatives to Marriage Project to lobby for them.

Perhaps, instead of buying a pot, pan, or part of a place setting, the best way to honor today's weddings is to write a check to AtMP. That way I could extend a tangible gift while remaining true to my political principles.

I suggest this as a substitute to the familiar and timeworn custom of purchasing wedding gifts for friends, coworkers, and family members. Those who are more financially able might provide matching funds: a $100 place setting for the bride and groom, and a $100 check to the Alternatives to Marriage Project, in the couple's name. Diverting funds from the wedding industry to AtMP, we contribute to a better future.

Jaclyn Geller teaches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature in the English department at Central Connecticut State University.