As a homosexual in a seemingly stable relationship, I have thought about the gay marriage issue for a grand total of about thirty seconds. If nothing else, allowing gay people to legally marry is a wonderful thing if your interest is in reasserting the ubiquity of divorce in modern society. We need it right now, divorce needs a good shot in the arm. What better PR boost than to let millions of fags in on the action? If I had been allowed to marry all these years I'd have been divorced three times already. But since my most meaningful relationships have been forced to exist in some slippery zone of partial reality, some shameful shadowy margin reserved for those disgusting human actualities which decent society deems it necessary to ignore, I have been spared the ignominy of spectacular public failure, taking small but grateful comfort in the idea that no one can judge me on fiascoes that never really existed.

Naturally the ostensible appeal of having one's relationship legitimized by the state is of precisely zero interest to me. Almost nothing that people say about marriage or other romantic partnerships strikes me as remotely true or realistic. Any time someone begins a sentence with "The key to a successful relationship is..." you should cover your ears and run for your life, especially if you suspect they're going to say "compromise" or "trust." To care about a public legitimation of gay marriage I'd have to share most of the values that cluster around the idea of marriage itself, and I don't. It's mostly a lot of wishful thinking and empty rhetoric. Marriage is in many ways a conversation-ender, whereas I think the strange psychologies that adhere one person to another are completely baffling and are more interesting as open questions that fill one's trembling heart with crippling anxiety on a near-constant basis. Now there's a Valentine's Day card for you.

The financial and legal implications are another matter, but I have nothing interesting or funny to say about them. Of course the same fact doesn't stop many other people from "weighing in" on the "raging debate." How I loathe the public discourse crucial to the health of a free society.