Ironically, gay marriage looms at the very moment straights have become openly disenchanted with the institution. It’s not simply that the divorce rate is 50 percent, with a large portion of the other 50 trundling on in neo-Strindbergian agony, unable or unwilling to make the break. Rather it’s the awareness that author Laura Kipness cites in her Against Love: A Polemic that “. . . the expectation that romance and sexual attraction will last a lifetime of coupled togetherness despite much hard evidence to the contrary” has begun to take its toll.
“The prevailing cultural wisdom,” Kipness declares, “is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short-lived phenomenon, ‘mature love’ will kick in to save the day when desire flags.” But this too is as much of a lie as the fundamentalist’s insistence that marital “morality” proceeds from a pair of virgins who discover sex solely through one another and repeat said act in faithful exclusively until death — thus reconfiguring an obsessive-compulsive disorder into a blessed sacrament. As anyone who has studied the history of marriage knows, Miss God and her minions didn’t get into the act until relatively late in the game for ceremonial effect.
“Marriages,” Kipness notes, “were business arrangements between families; participants had little to say on the matter.”
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/52/news-ehrenstein.php