“Lockman also notes that, over the past few decades, American women have always been likely to report high feelings of communality, like expressivity, warmth, and concern for the welfare of others. Men, meanwhile, are barely any more invested in communality than they have been in decades past — those numbers are still, as always, quite low.

If men are so resistant to communality, what if we were to bring the communality to them? France and other countries with progressive social programs have certainly not solved the problems born from sexism or misogyny, but encouraging a culture in which we are all responsible for each other’s well-being — rather than merely responsible for our own nuclear families — could have real, radical results. Audre Lorde has written about how the sharing of work can also be the sharing of joy, which “makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”

-Quote from the article

I’ve found this very structure to be the overarching contradiction to gay male marriage. A family of all men simply can’t sustain itself because men are only interested in being a member of group unless they feel they are the ones controlling it. The process of becoming a man is the pedagogy of how to divide a community into a unit within which you have power. We only know how to contain “weaker” people under a unit that we call our own privatized family unit. In gay community, that includes men of whatever lower social strata you can think of — age, race, class, etc. Once that feeling is lost, men typically move on, and it’s really hard to maintain, because don’t know how or simply refuse to communicate what they want and need.  

Patriarchy is a dominate-or-be-dominated hierarchy. For two men to be in a marriage, I’ve had to learn to simultaneously be more powerful (aka silent and resistant to control) than any man outside of my marriage, while simultaneously giving up my personal power to my husband. 

I have to choose to be the wife of the marriage. I don’t carry any of the gendered shame of it though. I was just telling KP this week that, in the long arc of my life, I’ve never really identified any other males as my peers. Only the women from my youth. 

But the reality is I’m structurally different to other wives. I can’t so easily be included in those circles of communication and community, because despite my role, I have a hard-bordered identity of being a man. 

I don’t know the answers. I can see why women want to eschew the institution entirely, but as long as it’s a presence in the world, we all have to find a way to live with it.

Instead, I have to find a way to be the sole man offering the emotional seed money to start and generally maintain a relationship with other gay men, and just have faith that maybe one day they’ll be comfortable enough to and eventually learn how to repay the favor. Until then, it’s a delicate line of relying on female emotional support when I absolutely need it, but not overbearing their emotional stores, showing up and providing that support more than I take it — 

Y’all’ve got enough male insecurity to deal with already.