Finding and Creating Meaning in the Ritual of Marriage

I recently got married.

For many people, this is a time to turn to religious practices that mark and understand the ritual of marriage. As a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist marrying a Unitarian Universalist, we found ourselves trying to make meaning, for ourselves, of this ritual and institution. I wanted to share how we came to understand this experience:  

As my grandfather got older, he became increasingly concerned with the ways in which we say “I love you.” As a cardiologist, he might say he had a professional predisposition to matters of the heart. But he also felt that, as a society, we did not say “I love you” often enough. As a critical theorist, I might say I have a professional predisposition for critiquing institutions like marriage and rituals like weddings.  

I had never thought much about marriage until I was about to get married. Other than an inexplicable amount of love I have for my partner, I came to find that it was an institution that I had more negative than positive feelings for. My friend, Kenji, described marriage as having its own peculiar history. His choice of words was not accidental. Although marriage as an institution is incomparable to the violence of slavery, they share roots in the legal ownership of another person. Marriage has been, and continues to be, a disciplinary tool that renders certain kinds of unions and certain kinds of families recognizable.  

As multiracial Japanese Americans, my partner and I know the benefits and harms of state recognition. In the early 20th century interracial marriages, when allowed at all, between Asian immigrants (who were ineligible for citizenship) and U.S. citizens, would strip the American of their citizenship. At the same time, both of our families made roots in America because of a picture bride system that allowed our great grandfathers to circumvent immigration exclusions to send for wives in Japan – the balm of domestic heteropatriarchy outweighed the U.S. government’s racial paranoia. In this moment, when the civil rights of many are being threatened or rolled back, it’s important for the two of us to understand the privileges afforded by this institution and the reality that liberation lies outside of it.