Some Straight People: I love you, but I don't get you sometimes

Okay, so I've explained that using friends from a certain group to protect against accusations of prejudice that group is tokenism, and I promised that was a setup for another post.

This post has been tumbling in my brain for several months now, but I knew it would strike people as judgy. So the previous post is intended not to condemn me or absolve me, but just to frame things.

I have lots of straight friends. This is an objective fact. Given that straight people are a majority of the population, it would be hard for anything else to be true. I also have gay friends, many of them, mostly that I've met in other ways, and we both happen to be gay. This post is about some of the straight friends. Not all, not even a lot of them. It's about the ones who have been in a relationship for years, in some cases with children, in most cases with the general expectation that they'll eventually marry, who haven't gotten engaged or gotten married. And it's especially for the ones who are together with the intention of staying together but are eschewing marriage altogether.

So this isn't tokenism. I'm not really identifying them simply by sexual orientation or another trait out of their control. I'm identifying them by a behavior. This is still going to sound judgy. That can't be helped. But it's not stereotyping or discrimination. I'm not proposing policy that would force behavioral change.

So here's what I'm saying: straight people who love each other and have been together forever but aren't married,

I don't understand you.

I know you have reasons for putting off the rights and benefits of marriage. I know you have reasons, if you have children, for not completing the legal process that will help to protect them. I know that the tax situation gets complicated and doesn't benefit everyone. I know that if you ever changed your mind, divorce is rough. I know that.

I also know that straight privilege is probably a factor, whether you've realized it or not. Because a hospital is less likely to refuse a parent to see their child if they're heterosexual. They're less likely to refuse to let you make medical decisions. If your situation changed and you needed to get married, you didn't need to move to a different state or investigate whether your home state would recognize an out-of-state marriage certificate, so you could always pop into the courthouse on pretty short notice.

I have straight friends. I have straight friends in this situation. I love them. I'm not asking them to change. All I'm saying is that from my perspective, when I've had to fight to have my relationship legally recognized and protected,

I don't understand.

And maybe the world could do with a few more people who admit when they don't understand things.