on moxie

Oooh, the stuff of an international Bourne thriller…Harper’s sending spy teams out to find you love-liars…you marital phonies…you refugee heart-breakers…Don’t protect us from nuclear fallout or military exhaustion or threats to language or equality rights…but please sir, protect me from my fetishization of the dark foreign stranger come to sweep me off my privileged pedicured white girl feet.

Next month is my ten year reunion for an international fairy-tale cooperative high school tucked into the mossy flesh of Vancouver island’s southwest coast. Maybe four of us managed to live there without falling in love. We didn’t have a single cynical thought between the hundred of us. I wouldn’t exactly call the lasting romances that resulted “convenient”: mountains of paperwork, explosively expensive travel, delayed careers, distant family, eventual separations and, occasionally, the most darling half-this half-that babies you ever laid eyes on. Some of us didn’t stay with the foreign partner we found at age sixteen, but ended up with another some while later, so the departure cities for those reuniting in June are flung about like confetti.

Difference is erotic- this is obvious, this is heterosexuality just as much as it is Orientalism or the colonial fetish in any other time and place. Having Harper suture my bursting lust for the Other is a practical joke. Eyes-rolling, I have thorough awareness of the planning industry, but I believe marriage is potentially sexual and impulsive (and isn’t the extreme opposite-arrangement- more frightening?).

Are phony marriages really on the rise? Or is marriage dissolution?

When gay and lesbian marriages were legalized across this reasonably progressive country, Moxi, my Latina schoolgirl friend and I discussed getting married. She was paying a fortune to study at U of T. She was living in a basement, working illegal bar and au-pairing. Our mutual European friend had just married a Canadian and her congruent challenges had dissolved in the marriage license ink. Do you know how much it costs to go to U of T if you are from Lithuania?

We didn’t do it. We were cowardly and a bit wistful, imagining how we’d still be hopping around on our twin self-shot-off-feet when our own dreamboats rowed into town. We didn’t know if we could actually stand living with each other for the requisite two years. We didn’t even know if our career trajectories could conceivably keep us in the same province for two years. (They didn’t. Wise girls).

But really, how phony would my and Moxi’s partnership have been compared to the half-dozen middle-aged arses who I know left their wives since Christmas to run off with secretaries? What is more foolish?

Improbable, immediate, international love happens. Aren’t we self-doubting enough already about affection without Harper’s intervention?