Not Separate, Just Equal

By John Cloud

Those joyous images of June 16, as crowds of couples entered into the first legal same-sex marriages in California, showed us the simple dignity that accrues from equality. No matter that activists had carefully orchestrated many of the photo ops. Marriage equality took too many years, and California voters could still snatch it back in an initiative this fall. For now, America is a nation where all couples, gay and straight, can wed, even if the gay ones have to make a trip to California to do so. (Or move to Massachusetts.)

For all the champagne and finery and tears, weddings ennoble a basic human necessity: the need for stability in our personal lives. Conservatives typically exaggerate the benefits of marriage; studies show that those who marry do not turn out to be happier, in the long run, than when they were single--and can feel much worse if they are divorced or widowed.

But marriage does have one great advantage that explains why most men--despite evolutionary impulses toward multiple sex partners--get hitched: according to the National Sex Survey, married people have better sex lives. Marriage creates solidity and predictability around sex, and for all the excitement of the unknown, most of us (Eliot Spitzer notwithstanding) are happier with a single sex partner.

Which raises a delicate question: Will gay men be happy in conventional, monogamous marriages? Or will gay marriage look different? Research has found that gay and lesbian couples have many strengths: they divide housework more equitably than straight couples, and they are less belligerent in arguments. But gay men are also less likely to be monogamous, and it's not clear that legal marriage will change that. Even AIDS did not; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hiv cases among gays have increased in recent years even as transmission among nongays has decreased.

Opponents of same-sex unions used some of these points to justify marriage inequality. They were wrong. But now a great sociological experiment begins: Will marriage change gay people or will gay people change marriage?

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