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I am a het­ero­sex­ual woman who recently mar­ried a man. I also sup­port same-sex mar­riage. So, I feel pretty torn about tak­ing part in a valu­able social prac­tice that is sys­tem­at­i­cally, per­ni­ciously and delib­er­ately (thanks to DOMA and the like) discriminatory.

I have heard of het­ero­sex­ual cou­ples who are engag­ing in a mar­riage boy­cott of sorts by refus­ing to con­sider mar­ry­ing until same-sex mar­riage is widely legal­ized. Ok, so maybe the only cou­ple who I’ve actu­ally heard is doing that is Brangelina, but I’m sure there are others.

This is a nice idea on the face of it, and I would never go so far as to say that it’s silly or wrong to do. But, the trou­ble is that boy­cotting mar­riage isn’t like boy­cotting busi­nesses. When peo­ple boy­cott a busi­ness, the busi­ness is pres­sured into com­ply­ing with the boy­cotters’ wishes because oth­er­wise they will lose lots of money. Mar­riage, alas, is not like that. The local gov­ern­ments will lose only triv­ial sums of money from the issuance of mar­riage licenses (I think?), and they might even stand to gain tax rev­enues if peo­ple remain unmar­ried, depend­ing on the finan­cial par­tic­u­lars of the would-be wed.

On the other hand, if most or all peo­ple who sup­port same-sex mar­riage quit mar­ry­ing for the time being, it would kind of cul­tur­ally sur­ren­der the insti­tu­tion of mar­riage to those who oppose same-sex mar­riage (and who would pre­sum­ably con­tinue to marry as usual). The same-sex mar­riage oppo­nents could spin the obser­va­tion that pre­dom­i­nantly (con­ser­v­a­tively) reli­gious peo­ple marry as fur­ther evi­dence that mar­riage is some kind of First Amend­ment pro­tected reli­gious prac­tice, or that it has deep and invi­o­lable his­tor­i­cal roots.  And, there is a risk that unmar­ried het­ero­sex­ual same-sex mar­riage advo­cates won’t be taken seri­ously, for the rea­son that the terms of an agree­ment should be set only by those who engage in it. It might be strate­gi­cally awk­ward for unmar­ried het­ero­sex­ual and homo­sex­ual peo­ple to col­lec­tively defend same-sex mar­riage on the grounds that mar­riage is a great insti­tu­tion that should be avail­able to all, when few of them have ever even expe­ri­enced actu­ally being mar­ried. Para­dox­i­cally, if that many peo­ple quit mar­ry­ing, mar­riage could look less and less like the basic and nec­es­sary human right that the same-sex mar­riage sup­port­ers so strongly believe that it is.

It seems, then, that the value of boy­cotting mar­riage must be sym­bolic. It is a show of sol­i­dar­ity with those same-sex cou­ples who also wish to marry but can­not do so. Unfor­tu­nately, if widely prac­ticed, it might actu­ally have the coun­ter­pro­duc­tive effect of allow­ing gay mar­riage oppo­nents to appro­pri­ate the insti­tu­tion of marriage.

If you are a mar­ried het­ero­sex­ual or a het­ero­sex­ual plan­ning to marry, there are lots of other ways of stand­ing in sol­i­dar­ity with those denied the right to marry. The whole rea­son that many homo­sex­ual peo­ple want to marry in the first place is because there are sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits attached to mar­riage — finan­cial, legal, social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, etc etc. I’m not sure it’s worth it, all things con­sid­ered, to deny one­self and one’s fam­ily those ben­e­fits for a sym­bolic ges­ture. Celebri­ties like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt might draw appre­cia­ble atten­tion to the cause by boy­cotting mar­riage, but your aver­age Jack and Jill prob­a­bly won’t. If you care that much about the issue, why not set aside some money from your wed­ding or vaca­tion bud­get and send it to an orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ports grass­roots same-sex mar­riage initiatives?

And if you need a lit­tle moti­va­tion to do that, watch the Courage Campaign’s “Don’t Divorce Us” video. The spe­cific mes­sage is out­dated since the Propo­si­tion 8 vote already took place, but it is still just as moving.