Adventures in Mamboland
"Jazz Fish, a saxophone playing wanderer, finds himself in Mamboland at a critical phase in his life." --Howie Green, on his book Jazz Fish Zen
Yeah. That sounds about right.
Yeah. That sounds about right.
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Date: 2009-06-24 01:36 am (UTC)The ceremony is the thing which makes the change.
Two people are not married. Then two people are married.
It is the ceremony that does it.
The question is: are intangible things real?
Are "the 82nd Airborne", "the 319 AFAR", and "marriage" real things?
If they are real, then things need to be done to put things in and out of statuses with respect to them.
There are people who don't think that marriage, for instance, is real. They think that living together with commitment, and being married, are fundamentally the same thing -- that the legal status afforded to marriage is stupid and pointless; they may get married to benefit from those legal recognitions, but the actual ceremony and status is meaningless to them.
And, in that case, the status IS meaningless to them.
But, for me, there was a genuine status change when I got married. My wife and I had been living together for years before that point. And we've lived together for ten years after that point.
But on that day, and through that ceremony, something changed. The ceremony did something.
It doesn't for everyone. It did for us.