The lavender marriage is back – but why? | Emma Beddington
TThe lavender wedding – that administrative convenience and public relations fiction of Hollywood’s golden age – is back. The Washington Post recently covered his reinvention, meeting Jacob Hoff, who is gay, and Samantha Greenstone, who is straight, a perfectly married couple with a baby on the way (they’ve been “the birds and the bees,” Greenstone explained for the pruriently curious). The Post also spoke with her friends April Lexi Lee and Sheree Wong, both “on the asexual spectrum,” who say they “fought so hard that we got married…platonically.”
Of course, if you’re openly talking about a lavender wedding, it’s not one. Their aim was to confer a fig leaf of heteronormative respectability at a time when this was professionally and socially essential; These people are not there for appearances. Hoff and Greenstone don’t like the term: “It devalues what we really have, which is a loving marriage,” Greenstone says. But “lavender marriage” has been co-opted online as shorthand for different forms of loving, committed relationships that aren’t centered on conventional romance and sexual desire, both as far-fetched aspiration and lived experience. They need another name: Some people call themselves Platonic Life Partners (PLP); I saw “rainbow wedding” on TikTok.
If you’re my age, in a heterosexual marriage in a North Yorkshire suburb rather than a Portland, Oregon polycule, there are a spectrum of options for how you might view these unions, from ‘harrumphaning great uncle’ to enthusiastically enthusiastic, with a real danger of sounding like a groovy vicar, struggling to discuss it with the kids, when he discusses it. I’ll take that chance: a groovy vicar here, showing up for work, to address some troubling points. The HGU (and I’m assuming he’s not homophobic, just a little baffled) might say something like, “Isn’t it just friendship?”s? Why treat them as something different? Why get married?
Hoff and Greenstone absolutely don’t see their relationship that way, but for those who do, why? not get married? I don’t view my union as having an exalted status, simply because it was forged in a conventional romantic relationship or sexual attraction – it’s still mostly two people watching TV and bickering about trash. We no longer treat marriage – a historically property-based transaction and still a patriarchal institution – as a sacrament susceptible to taint by its extension to other types of love, do we? “Just” friendship is just as sacred and deserves to be formalized; this was sometimes the case, and in certain places. In his recent book Bad friendTiffany Watt Smith describes the history of friendship pacts and ritualized contracts since the Iberian era of the 13th century. coniurationes and early modern French chartersto choose one belayingDo – a close friend raised to the rank of kin – by the Aku women of Cameroon at puberty.
There are very good reasons to marry someone you love, especially from an economic standpoint. The “one-time penalty” is real: rent, bills, not benefiting from tax breaks add up; In the United States, health insurance is a considerable additional consideration. Exploring the lavender phenomenon, Vice and Business Insider presented it as a Gen Z response to economic hardship (coupled with understandable dating fatigue). And marriage, rather than ad hoc cohabitation as platonic companions, is good for us in other fundamental ways: Married people enjoy longer life expectancies and better health outcomes (especially, I have to mutter, men). The intimacy – physical or not – the emotional support and sense of security that a good marriage can provide is protective; as Lee says, “I realized how much easier it is for me to thrive in this world with a partner.”
An HGU might also object that such relationships have always existed, privately, with some satisfaction. Why post them on social media? Both couples in the Post article proudly talk about the particulars of their marriage online (content creation is Hoff’s main source of income), responding to people who are hostile or just curious, and I actually find that particularly admirable. Because unlike the lavender weddings of the 1930s, these, through their chosen visibility, powerfully demonstrate that love in all its forms deserves to be recognized and officially celebrated. They explain what marriage can be and yes, it’s a terribly groovy vicar’s statement, but in our age of submissive traditional women, book bans and narrowly defined exclusionary ‘Christian’ values reframing empathy as a sin, I find it extremely exciting.
