Dan Savage, The Commitment

I was spending a leisurely weekday afternoon with a friend in Dupont Circle earlier this summer when he suggested we head to Lambda Rising. Being the book-hound that I am, I was more than happy to oblige (although if he twisted my arm, I would have liked that, too!)

Despite the number of books that we have shared with one another in our time as friends, up to that point we had never gone to a bookstore together. It’s not as small as some bookstores I’ve been to, but I’ve certainly been to larger as well (one thing I miss about not having visited San Francisco in the past year is my usual sojourn to A Different Light bookstore).

In any case, Dan Savage’s book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family caught his eye (as did another text, which for the sake of privacy will remain nameless here). Sufficed to say, he went home with that latter text, while I went home with The Commitment. (I figured I could read it and then pass it on.)

I wasn’t really sure what about The Commitment caught his eye, he wasn’t actually familiar with Dan Savage, and had never even read a “Savage Love” column before. Still, something pulled him to the book, and brought it into my/our lives.

I certainly don’t think I would have picked it from the shelves myself—there’s been so much same-sex marriage talk of late that I’ve been feeling burned out on the topic (especially since so many conversations about it just don’t seem to reflect half the nuances I think are involved). In the end, though, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much the book has gotten me thinking...

Non-monogamy, promises, actions, negotiating in order to make a life together, politics, family, religion, tradition, and of course, CAKE—these are just some of the rich fillings in The Commitment. There is so much in this book, in fact, that I still haven’t been able to really get a grasp of the thing as a whole. In the mean time, thought I’d share some of my favorite passages:

Savage, Dan. The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. New York: Plume, 2006.

(49) When your life is going along nicely, when things are looking good, the correct posture to assume is one of gratitude, absent of any hint that you expect your good fortune to last.

(58) “Leave space in your relationships so the angels have room to play.”

(63) “Everyone told me I was a dumb fuck and they were right, you know. I am a dumb fuck. But it was something I did [got a tattoo of a woman’s name] when I loved somebody, so I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t regret it. It was a good time in my life, and I like to be reminded of it.”

(65-66) “Well, sure. That emotional and physical response must have some basis or the myth would not have come into being. By ‘myth’ I don’t mean ‘lie,’ I mean a story a culture uses to explain itself to itself. At the same time, this myth of true love, of this other half that completes you, it’s only in the last couple of centuries that the marriage [end page 65] contract and the completion of the self with another have become one and the same thing. For the ancient Greeks, it was often a boy, or another male, that was your other half. But men didn’t marry boys. The other half was about romantic love, and marriage wasn’t a romance. Until modern times, marriage was an economic contract.”

(129) Children are conservative inasmuch as they require stability in order to feel secure and therefore generally prefer things to stay the same. They need ritual and familiarity. One of the most underrated virtues—one I’d like to see virtuecrats promote to parents everywhere, and a virtue many homos have a problem with—is constancy.

(134) When people have to pretend that they find no one else attractive, they have to suppress a large part of their sex drive, and that means suppressing (unconsciously, sure, but definitely) their sexual feelings about their partner.

(137) It’s impossible for two people to be all things to each other sexually, and the expectation that two people must be all things to each other sexually—that they should never find another person attractive or act on that attraction—does a great deal of harm…If we want to promote stable, lasting relationships—particularly for all those naturally conservative kids out there—we shouldn’t encourage people to have unrealistic expectations about sex, love, and desire.

(140-141) “It’s not enough to make a commitment,” the room murmured. “People won’t take your commitment seriously if you just run down to city hall or fly off to [end page 140] Vegas. If you want people to take your relationship seriously, if you want them to believe you’re really in love, then you need to marry in the presence of Gay, friends, family, ministers, caterers, waiters, banquet hall managers, bakers, bartenders, disc jockeys, jewelers, florists, wedding consultants, limo drivers, photographers, videographers, and Web designers. Oh, and ice sculptors—don’t forget the ice sculptors.”

(145-146) Nontraditional weddings can never really free themselves from the specter of a traditional wedding. When straight couples promise to “love and honor” each other, everyone in the pews immediately things, “Hey, they dropped ‘obey.’” If the bride walks down the aisle in a hula skirt, it only draws attention to the fact that she opted not to wear a traditional wedding gown. The sole measure of a nontraditional wedding cake is its distance from a traditional wedding cake, and to calculate that distance, you have to call up a mental image of a traditional wedding cake. So [end page 145] powerful are wedding rituals and symbols that even their absence evokes them!

(147) So we can have our weddings and our dignity, too, but only if we mock the traditions we want to borrow?
Precisely.

(195) There has to be a cake. I want cake. I require cake.

(213) I’m probably not doing Terry’s position justice—he’ll have to write his own book if he wants to see his point of view accurately portrayed.

(241) For children, promises are a deadly serious business because it’s all they really have. They don’t own anything, they don’t control anything. The promises their parents make them are all they’ve got. And while no parent can keep every promise he makes—no child can either—your credibility as a parent rests on a promises-kept-to-promises-broken ranking that your child carries around in his head. Keep more than you break, and you’re a parent in good standing. Break more than you keep and you’re in trouble.

(243) “Jerry and I didn’t have to get married either. We both knew the downside,” Mom said. “We were both divorced after long marriages, and despite the trauma, we both learned to trust again, and that was very difficult. It wasn’t easy to say ‘I trust you’ after what we had been through, believe me. We really knew what it meant the second time around. It felt risky and we didn’t want to look foolish. We had to trust each other and that was hard. And trust is what marriage really means.”