Wedding List = Wedding Pissed

I may be smug, middle class and a Guardian reader but there is little I rally against more in life than Wedding Lists or Bridal Registries or whatever you call that socially ordained entitlement whereby couples in love skip merrily across department store floors, furnishing out their little nests in the hope that the mint green sushi bowls and 1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets muffle the sound of their inner ids screeching "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!"

I know all the arguments. I come fully equipped with counter-arguments.

"You'll get ten toasters!"
Um ... we've been living together for five years. I doubt anyone would give us a toaster. Besides - we dig the toast! The toast gets eaten almost daily.

"You'll need things"
We've got things. Anything else is a bonus, an upgrade, a luxury, a gift! But under no circumstances is it a need.

"But you get to kit out a whole place"
Uh ... yeah. At the expense of all our friends and family.

Throw some at me, bitches! This is my area de expertise: gifts, my friends, are my forte. I give them, I receive them, hell, I even sell them! The whole essence of the gift, in my way informed opinion, is the manifestation of feelings between people and about shared experience. What's the "perfect" gift? One given that recalls a private joke or a previous conversation, one sparked by a shared interest or motivated by the interest to share one. And if you don't want to put in that much thought, fine. Buy me a toaster. Buy me forty blenders. Buy me nothing! But money can't buy me love and weddings shouldn't be about fecking things. I have been called idealistic about this, immature. Been told "You can't live on love alone". Duh! Like I didn't know that. Everyone these days knows you must, absolutely, live on champagne and fucking.

Once upon a time (almost) everyone squeezed themselves into the confines of coupledom but not everyone gets married these days. Some people are single by choice. Many are denied the right to marriage on the basis of the sex of the person with whom they share their lives. The world has, thankfuckfully, evolved beyond the married/leper dichotomy that characterised much of recent Western social history. As my dad would say, not always in a complimentary way, our generation, inspired by Seinfeld and Friends, were led to believe that friends were the new family and family were just comic peripheral characters on the side (Estelle Harris, Jerry Stiller, Elliot Gould ... a theme, d'you (jew) think? That's for you, G!). But at least broader thinking about family/ relationships leads to more inclusive policies that concern themselves with affording equal civil rights to all people regardless of whether they find a romantic partner, a platonic best friend or a group of like-minded citizens.

So until those groups, or indeed singles, get to have weddings, those of us who do should use ours as platforms for the demands for equal rights for all! Down to heteronormativity and the really ridiculously reductive Gay/Straight, Couple/Single Binary! Until every last polymorphously perverse intersex collective can swan around John Lewis/David Jones/JC Penneys and kvell about china patterns and DVD stands, this lady behind these words is happy with whatever she gets and whatever she doesn't get. He and I have a million times more than my parents ever had. A trillion times more than Nana and Zaida. Getting married is so so so not about things. And if it is for you, well, I feel so sorry for you.