Is marriage hegemonic?

"[Marriage] is kind of a lovely thing and a cool thing and a wonderful thing."

So said Paul Singer, a billionaire hedge fund manager and a major donor for the Republican party.

Frank Bruni quotes him to argue that even among the Republicans a pro-same-sex marriage stance is gaining traction.

But what catches my attention is the mindlessness in the rapture. For those for whom it works, marriage is "cool", "lovely", and "wonderful".

But for some, marriage could be a singularly unlovely institution. What should they do? Lament about being "losers"?

No; instead of measuring the success or lack thereof of happiness in their lives through the lens of the success of marriages, they could revel in divorce.

Wendy Paris for instance, does that. Paris writes of her unhappy experience of the institution of marriage. During the time she was married to her husband, whom she deeply loved, she could never find happiness with him, in the sense that they never seemed to see eye to eye on anything.

They were trying to be "married" rather than happy on their own, free-of-social-convention terms.

No sooner than they started talking divorce, happiness and agreement returned into their lives, as did the spirit of cooperation, like ideas on how to raise their son.

In Paris' narrative, marriage ends up, not being villainous or something to be yearned for, but just another way of living together--a specific kind of domestic arrangement, that is.

The coup of her story is what she does with divorce. Divorce is an alternative way of living happily as well; it's not seen as the monstrous, heart-wrenching opposite of marriage, but a specific way of living together and in this sense, quite like marriage

Reading Paris one thinks of marriage as a hegemonic institution that has drowned out the validity of all others, including divorce:

It takes real work to hold the nuances in your head, to remain kind and considerate, to remember why you married in the first place and still push forward to separate. As a culture, we understand that a good marriage takes work. Why not work equally hard to have a good divorce? To paraphrase the 17th-century poet John Milton in his treatise supporting divorce, a key purpose of marriage is joyful companionship; a fraught union violates the point.

Paris' relationship with her husband got better and better, solider and solider, the day the couple hatched the thought of divorce.