I am getting married in two days’ time. Yay… hooray for me!
On 23 June 2016, after hearing the result of the Brexit referendum, my partner looked at me and said “well if it ends up being really necessary I guess I could always marry you” and with those romantic words began our four-year “sort of” engagement, whilst we waited for the UK to decide if it really wanted to leave Europe or whether to postpone the decision for another few months. Don’t get me wrong: I love my partner a lot but, before that, marriage wasn’t really ever on the cards. But now it seems the UK has finally made its terrible decision, and as a result of that – and my disability – we now need to marry.
This got me thinking about the way in which disability, and the freedom to marry (or not) interact, and the ways in which we have somehow conflated love with a contract to the state – to allow us access to certain things.
Marriage and disability raise so many issues, so I have tried to pull out some of the conversations that were entirely missed when people were fighting for (and celebrating) marriage equality. Because, despite the fact that, for example, LGBTQ marriage is now legal in many places, marriage is still not accessible to all. Marriage equality does not yet exist.
In some places it is illegal to marry if you are disabled
To start with the very obvious reason why marriage equality does not yet exist, in some places in the world, including a number of states in the USA (I think this number is 38 but it is not easy to verify), it is illegal to get married with certain disabilities (including epilepsy and “feeble mindedness”). Although these rules are often not enforced, the fact that they still exist is an ode to the strong prevalence of the eugenics movement which peaked in many countries in the west between the late 1800s and mid-1900s.
The eugenics movement was not just a fringe movement but contained many people actively involved in government, policy-making, and within science, including Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, John Manyard Keynes, and even William Beveridge, the creator of the welfare state in the UK. A very popular opinion in the eugenicist movement was the idea that marriage – considered the prerequisite for having children – should be very strongly controlled to avoid the possibility of passing down “weakness” and disability to the next generation. The idea of this was to breed out disability. Forced sterilization and marriage laws were a big part of this. In the UK it did not actually become law that disabled people could not marry, but in the US and other countries in Western Europe it did.
In most places in Western Europe, even if these laws exist, they are not actively enforced as far as I am aware, but it is nonetheless important to understand the eugenicist history behind marriage and disability. Marriage has been used for many years as a means to stop reproduction and protect the “genetic purity” of a certain group. That is why, historically, there has been legislation against interracial marriages, disabled marriages, inter-class marriages and LGBTQ marriages. By excluding these groups of people from marriage, the aim was to breed out things that were considered bad for the human race. Marriage, after all, has historically been more about a contract with the state, the church or with both than it has been about love. It is only in the last hundred years or so that love has been a big consideration in marriage.
Disabled people often cannot afford to get married
Whilst in many places, in principle, it is now legal to get married if you are disabled, de facto there are many considerations that make it very difficult for a significant number up of disabled people to do so.
Yes, weddings are generally expensive, but it is not the cost of the wedding ceremony that stops a lot of disabled people getting married; it is the fact that many disabled people lose access to benefits when they get married. Disabled people are over represented in unemployment figures, due to employer discrimination and to the simple fact that many disabled people cannot work. This means that they are often reliant on state welfare, disability benefits and state health insurance. In many countries this does not even equate to a full-time minimum wage, and with the expenses that being disabled brings, it means that disabled people are often financially very insecure.
However, when disabled people marry, in many countries their benefits are either reduced or completely taken away and all the financial responsibility for the entire household falls onto the spouse – a huge pressure on any relationship. In today’s society, unless you are marrying a footballer, a banker or a politician – and let’s face it, most of us aren’t – one income is not really enough to support a household, let alone one that has to factor in medical bills. So, this makes marriage unattainable for the average disabled person on benefits meaning that, whilst marriage is legally allowed, in reality, laws surrounding benefits make it an impossibility. I have even seen instances of people having to divorce after becoming dependent on disability welfare, because this was the only way they could afford to live.
To throw a spanner into the works here, in the USA, health insurance is often tied to work status. So for many unemployed disabled people, when they are no longer able to be on their family’s insurance (if their family has insurance), if they have a working and insured spouse, they need to get married in order to have health insurance, something which is essential if you are disabled or chronically ill. Then the decision to get married becomes more of a toss-up between health insurance and disability benefits – rather than a decision about love. For many, it is a necessity whilst for others it is an impossibility.
Why is this bad? Well, besides the obvious point that it is unfair that disabled people do not have the same access to marriage as able bodied people, in many countries marriage allows you to access many benefits which, otherwise, you cannot. For example: it is far easier to get a mortgage when you are married than when you are alone or trying to get a joint mortgage; it effects visiting and information rights in hospitals; it sometimes cuts tax costs. In fact, being unable to get married excludes you from a vast number of things: if you want to find out more, there is a plethora of information created by the LGBT marriage equality movement.
My story
Given all of this, why am I getting married? Well, as I already mentioned, it is for two reasons: Brexit; and my disability. When the UK decided to leave the European Union four years ago, I became very worried about the state of my residency in the Netherlands. I was just finishing at university and, after that, I knew I would not be able to work, certainly not full time. At that point in time I was advised not to apply for disability benefits in case it hurt my application for a residency permit when the time came.
Fast-forward four years, and the time has come (last week) to apply for a residency permit. Whilst there is a chance that I will get it, one of the requirements is that you have had a certain income for the last five years. Being unemployed and disabled, I have not had that; nor even close to that! So, whilst I’m hoping they will give me a residency permit, it seems unlikely.
That leads me to the reason I am getting married: to ensure I can stay in the Netherlands. After living here since 2013, I intend to become a Dutch citizen. This requires that I have a certain level of Dutch, which I am learning, and if I want to keep my English passport too, that I am married to a Dutch person. So, to put it more simply, my disability is the reason why I can no longer live in the country of my choice, nor in other parts of the EU – unless I get married. And this is by no means a unique situation, as an immigrant, or, more specifically, as a disabled immigrant.
Disability, marriage and immigration
Marriage and immigration are already incredibly interlinked. Getting married to a person of the right nationality is often a fast-track method of getting residency and citizenship in the country you want to live in. So much so that most countries have laws against “sham” marriages, where people without real relationships and “love” marry in order to allow the non-citizen of a country access to residency.
In the Netherlands, to apply for residency through marriage you have to prove that you are in a real relationship and that you both love each other. It is a very weird process in which the state stands judgement over which loves and relationships are genuine, and then, on the basis of their subjective beliefs, decides whether to give or deny a residency permit. The conflation of lifelong love and residency/citizenship rights into one process seems to me to be a very incompatible mix.
Disability complicates this situation further. Believe it or not, emigrating as a disabled person who is unable to work is actually very difficult. If I use the Dutch system as an example, the requirements for immigration into the Netherlands as an individual either require a person to have lived there for a certain period of time (which is not possible if you cannot get a residency permit in the first place), to have a job that will sponsor you, or a freelance job with almost a minimum wage income. That excludes anybody unable to work from receiving a residency permit.
In some countries, people with disabilities are just plainly not allowed in. It is only two years (2018) since Canada lifted a 40-year ban on allowing disabled people into the country. In practice, this ban mostly affected disabled children and partners of immigrants with work permits. Given that immigration is so difficult as a disabled person, and more specifically as a non-working disabled person, the only option left for many disabled people is to marry a citizen of the country to which they want to emigrate – once again, removing any aspect of choice about marriage for these people.
As a side note, it is important to mention here that whilst I – as a white, middle class female with a powerful passport and a higher education – already face immigration problems, I am in many ways in a much better position that many disabled people trying to immigrate or take refuge. Not only have I been able to live in the Netherlands for nearly seven years, and therefore already speak Dutch and have a genuine and sustained relationship with a Dutch person, but, additionally, my family managed recently to raise the funds to buy me an apartment here – and as such, I am considered significantly richer than my bank accounts and income might demonstrate!
The vast majority of people are not in this position, in any way, and are likely to face far more intense barriers to immigration than I have. It is vital that we begin to see more inclusion around the extra challenges disability creates in immigration.
But back to the discussion of marriage. Immigration is already more difficult for disabled people, and the only option left for many non-working, disabled people who wish to emigrate is to marry a citizen of the place where they would like to live. This severely limits disabled people’s movement around the world, but it also adds another coercive topic into marriage: the conflation of marriage for love with immigration is already questionable, but when you add in disability, the need to immigrate often trumps any question of love in a marriage. It becomes a bureaucratic procedure gatekeeping access to residency or citizenship. To refer back to the beginning of this article, it also then demonstrates another aspect of marriage being used to protect the identity of a specific group.
So, should we fight for marriage equality?
My simple answer to this is no. This may seem counter-intuitive, considering what I have just written. But given the history of marriage, every time we celebrate a new group being allowed access to marriage, we realise that, in fact, there are many people and relationship arrangements for whom it is not yet allowed – once again demonstrating that marriage in its current form is still only an option for a very specific group of people.
Perhaps a bigger problem than who is/ is not allowed to marry arises from the confusing duality that, whilst marriage is widely considered to be the way in which you demonstrate your love to an individual, it is also a bureaucratic contract made between you and the state. Firstly, a celebration of love is a beautiful thing. I have been so lucky to see so many loving relationships in my life: my grandparents’ and my parents’ relationships both prove to me every day that love is a beautiful and very real thing, and having an opportunity to celebrate that is wonderful.
Where I have a problem is that marriage is very often, especially when you are in the position of being disabled, immigrating, getting a mortgage, etc., a necessary procedure, devoid of choice, and devoid of romance, undertaken in order to access things that should, in any case, be accessible to everyone – not just for those who happen to be lucky enough to have found a partner. It seems utterly bizarre that, by undergoing a procedure to demonstrate your love, you can lose access to your income: ‘I want to show you how much I love you, but I can no longer afford to eat!’ I just don’t see how or why the two things interlink.
So, instead of centering a fight for marriage equality for disabled people, I think it is more important to tackle the destructive conflation of legal and bureaucratic rules with the celebration of love. This would not only help to tackle these problems for disabled people in relationships, but also for single disabled people, single people who have not found (or maybe do not want to find) a significant other – and the many other groups still unable to access marriage, and therefore barred from the benefits marriage brings legally. This would prevent marriage being a gatekeeping process, maintaining specific social groupings at the expense of others – and allow it to become a true celebration of love, devoid of legal repercussions.
Happy Ending?
I know that, for many people, this might be quite a shocking piece of writing. I personally don’t know many people who are critical of marriage and I have rarely seen writing like this, other than in very specific leftist political spaces. This last part, however, is a positive note for my readers!
I am very much in love with my partner, he is incredibly supportive and caring and we have lots of fun times, so getting married to him is in no way a chore! In addition, I am still a little girl at heart and do want to wear a pretty dress, so if the pandemic ever allows me to go back to the UK and see my family and friends again, we will be celebrating our marriage, in a low key way – and I will wear a dress! I am not completely devoid of my little girl romantic ideals even if my views and my proposal were singularly unromantic!
