Good point--I'm assuming it's the gay marriage--and assuming if she had a heterosexual marriage she would have written "my husband" instead of "my spouse" or "my partner." But I suppose she could have had more than one gay/lesbian marriage, too.
Five to ten years ago, if I heard a woman refer to "my partner" I would assume her partner was a woman, and sometimes would be mildly surprised to find it was a man. But these days it has become such a common locution that I don't make assumptions one way or another when someone says it.
(However, I have rarely if ever heard a straight man refer to his female partner as "my partner" -- if I did, I would probably assume he meant his business partner.)
Perhaps she kept that undisclosed because it might have been a distraction to readers who didn't already know she's lesbian? Plus, in a way I think the gender of her spouse is kind of irrelevant to the story she's telling. I understand that the loss of a pregnancy sometimes leads to the breakup of heterosexual couples, too.
( * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * )I decided to retrieve the relevant passages. She doesn't appear to be quite bending over backward to avoid revealing gender -- the sentences feel graceful and natural -- yet the omission, over three mentions, doesn't feel quite random, either. Meanwhile, at least two men in the piece are referred to as having wives.
I could still feel spikes of adrenaline when I was back at my desk in New York, typing, while my spouse cooked a chicken in the kitchen.
My partner—who had always indicated that I would need to cast the deciding vote on parenthood—had come with me, and we were having one of those magical moments in a marriage when you find each other completely delightful.
Within a week, the apartment we were supposed to move into with the baby fell through. Within three, my marriage had shattered.
I agree that the partner's gender is not crucial to the story. But the essay is full of details that, strictly speaking, it could have lived without: the games she played as a child, what the Greek publisher and his wife (ahem) served for dinner in their apartment, Mongolia's mineral resources. I'm not saying they were excessive or padding, I'm saying that it seems significant that out of all the details she did include, one she didn't, apparently deliberately, is the gender of her (presumably) same-sex partner.
Given that one of the benefits of marriage equality is that it "normalizes" women having wives and men husbands in mainstream minds, it would have been nice to see a casual mention of her wife without further ado. I'm always happy to see same-sex couples portrayed in the media in ways that we're used to seeing straight couples portrayed, without fanfare.
Another possibility is that this is actually a later marriage, the spouse/partner this time is a man, and if she used male pronouns she feared she'd confuse people like us who are familiar with her wedding essay. But nor did she want to have to stop and explain ("Oh, by the way, in case you read my other essay, this is someone else ...").
Topic: In the New Yorker... (Read 2390506 times)