Good news.

I know I mentioned a few posts ago that I had good news to share with you all.

Andy and I are engaged.

As a feminist, marriage is a concept I’ve struggled with. On the one hand, something about weddings has always appealed to me. They are pretty, it’s nice to celebrate love, they bring together family and friends who don’t often see each other. On the other hand, marriage is an institution with a pretty tarnished history. It isn’t exactly a pillar of equality. Weddings themselves are imbued with patriarchal and religious symbolism, and the language of traditional weddings is really abhorrent (honour and obey? Fuck off). And contemporary weddings have become a huge profit-making industry—I read last week that the average Aussie wedding costs $40,000.

However, not all weddings and marriages have to fall into that model. There are a lot that don't. I think that if both individuals are aware of the problems, they can be overcome. And for that reason, I felt comfortable saying yes when Andy asked me to marry him (in a very non-traditional manner). He gets it. I’m not saying our relationship is perfect—if it were, we would probably both be pretty bored. But, over the past four years we have both been challenged, and we’ve worked together to achieve what I think is a pretty egalitarian relationship (of course, we’ll have to keep working together as the years progress!).

I’m over the moon about this new turn our relationship has taken. We’ve made no plans yet (and probably won’t for a while, given our schedules until December—he’s away for 6 weeks, then I’m away for a week, then his parents are here, then he’s away for a month, then I’m away for two weeks), but I’m looking forward to doing things our own way.