Same-sex college marriage is not a last resort

Last week, I got officially college-married to a great gal! (For any of you following my Tab journey, this was indeed the girl I told I loved on my first Sunday Life). Our wedding ceremony – pre-formal, in full fancy dress, involving a great deal of prosecco – was supposed to be the best day of our fresher lives (maybe?), but it was tainted with raised eyebrows and false prejudices. "I'm sure, if you waited, a boy would have asked you!", they said. "Are you sure you want to marry a girl so early?", they said. There is this myth that guys or girls do not college-marry one another (even if they aren't straight in real life) unless it is Easter term and they are desperate: what I call 'last-resort syndrome'. To unfortunately quote a certain dickhead on his first anniversary, this is 100% fake news.

The fancy dress wedding of my dreams

There are so many perks to same-sex college-marriage, and here are just a few:

1. You now have the ideal wingman/wingwoman – they know just how great it is to be with you and won't feel threatened by your potential lover

2. You have double the wardrobe (because what's mine is yours)

3. You constantly have someone to bring you late-night chicken nugs or pay for your post-Cindies Van of Life when you have no cash

4. Top meme buddy

I can already hear people yelling at their computer screens "these are the perks of all college marriage, you div". That is my point. There is no difference. So why is there this 'last-resort' myth?

Fact: Chicken nuggets are an aphrodisiac

Perhaps it's an obsession with gender roles. Hold onto your hats, I'm not saying that there is some misogynistic conspiracy in the collegiate system. But there seems to be some inbred assumption that there must be a balance between the masculine and the feminine to qualify a relationship (even, seemingly, within the institutional joke of college-marriage).

Let's be honest. Most of us still tend to call our mother for comfort, nurture, and care (for example, when we're having an essay crisis and we just need a good cry). Meanwhile, our father is always there for more practical aid (such as when our laptop stops working). It's upsetting to admit, but it's the truth. Despite all of the great bounds towards gender equality, we are brought up with certain assumptions which take constant and concerted efforts to fight.

Stop the press. A female proposal? Why, that's sheer madness.

Even in college-marriage, it is general practice to whip out those old clichés: "I wear the trousers in this relationship", "she's got me whipped". One girl told me that she was the man in her college-marriage because she proposed to her husband. Is it not disheartening that these presumptions still prevail in the Twenty-First Century? Studies have shown that millenials do not want to be defined by our gender – yet we still are.

*Nerd alert* I sincerely apologise for sounding like I'm writing a supervision essay, but it seems necessary to define 'gender'. The Cambridge English Dictionary definiton is 'the physical and/or social condition of being male or female'; but this seems facile. Alice Dreger claimed in her 2010 TED talk "We now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn’t draw the line for us between male and female". I think it acceptable to argue that gender is a relative concept based on social standards. Blue used to be the colour for girls and pink for boys – this transformation in perceptions of gender over time suggests gender, in its social sense, is not real! *Nerd alert over*.

"You want a revolution, I want a revelation" (Lin Manuel Miranda, 2016)

I am not a feminazi. I am a feminist. There is a difference. I want equality for men and women and everything in between. This includes equality in gender roles. My college marriage, as a straight girl to another girl is not an act of desperation, nor a dramatic stand. Thanks for understanding.

"Are you sure you want to marry a girl so early?". Yes I fucking am.