Netflix’s The Ultimatum: Queer Love is the steaming platform’s first queer dating reality show. Its previous instalment featured cishet people. The five couples (Lexi and Raelyn, Mal and Yoly, Sam and Aussie, Tiff and Mildred, and Vanessa and Xander) in its new season, hosted by the American actor JoAnna Garcia Swisher, are concerned about their relationship’s future as they are faced with the dilemma of getting married.
While one of the partners of all the five couples has given an ultimatum — “marry or move on” — to the other, in the time they’ve to decide they’re allowed to interact and form pairs with other participants. This caveat makes it interesting as those who were reluctant to get married find themselves agreeing to the idea of marriage with someone else. All this makes for a curious watch. Given the ongoing fight for marriage equality in India, Moneycontrol connected with three queer couples who share their stories and viewpoints on the show.
Being on the same page helps
P, a software engineer, met his partner, also into tech, on a dating app. They’ve known each other since 2014 and have been living together for almost nine years now. Regarding the question of marriage, P says, “In the beginning, it was a thing we would tease each other about. And bring up marriage as a joke. After a couple of years, I would say ‘Marry me’ instead of saying ‘I love you’. It came from a place of deep affection towards my partner where saying ‘I love you’ was no longer sufficient. Now that we are no longer young, marriage comes up as a practical need for issues such as co-ownership of the apartment we’ve both built together, getting health insurance, co-signing a loan, and my partner being able to give medical consent if anything were to happen to me.”
All this ties back to the “bouquet of rights” that queer people will be able to avail if marriage equality is upheld by the apex court, as senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy argued during the hearings. P’s partner, who says that the “question of getting married doesn’t come up that often”, notes that “it feels like we are already married as we’ve lived together as a couple for almost nine years. It doesn’t make either of us nervous or uncomfortable. We’re pretty open to the idea and enjoy discussing it. We are on the same page about marrying each other.”
Echoing the thoughts of several participants of the Netflix show, P says that “not being on the same page at the same time is always a deal breaker. It’s best to re-calibrate expectations, talk it out, and decide whether [you] need more time or [see if] there are fundamental disagreements. I don’t think not wanting to commit to a relationship is necessarily a sign of being unfaithful. Maybe they are not ready — emotionally [or] mentally. It’s okay to take time. Not every relationship needs to result in a marriage.”
P’s partner adds, “We both feel that marrying someone who you love and enjoy your time with is critical for a marriage to be a success. Marriage is definitely not like spending a short amount of time with a casual sex partner. It’s not easy to live with a person! We realised that doing even the most monotonous chores in life can be fun if one has their favourite person around them.”
Marriage only for practical reasons
Author of Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India (Yoda Press x Simon & Schuster, 2023) and the host of the podcast Queerious Connections and her (closeted) partner, a graphic designer, have been living together for seven years.
“We both individually decided when we were young (even before we discovered our sexuality) that we don’t see ourselves getting married to anyone. Of course, we were thinking of heterosexual marriage at the time; we hadn’t seen a single example of a marriage around us that was happy and nurturing so we didn’t want that for ourselves,” they note.
Further, “The question of marriage only comes up [during] jokes about our wedding: the ridiculous costumes we’d wear or the close family we won’t invite. We have had a serious conversation about marriage and decided that we’d only marry for practical reasons, mainly for joint-property ownership and medical guardianship.”
The couple, who hasn’t watched the show because they found it “quite cringey” and “melodramatic”, feel that marriage is an “outdated institution”. They further note that it “can, perhaps, be practical and useful for raising children together, but for child-free individuals like us, other than the practical reasons stated above, marriage doesn’t serve any purpose other than inviting our families into the relationship, which may or may not be very helpful for the relationship.”
Happy with the way things are
Nitin, 32, who is self-employed, and Arjun, 38, an entrepreneur, were in a long-distance relationship for the past 12 years and have only recently started living together. “We met out of the blue one day at a Nirula’s on a Christmas evening and never looked back since,” they fondly share. But the “question of marriage has almost never [come] up because of the long-distance relationship. But even if it does come up, it will not unnerve either of us. We both are as comfortable with the idea of marriage as we are [with] just being able to live together. We feel this way because none of us wants to move to a country with marriage rights. We hope for marriage rights in our own country. Till then, we are happy just the way things are.”
For both Nitin and Arjun not marrying is not a deal breaker. They both “believe being faithful or not has nothing to do with the state of being married. Firstly, faithfulness is an innate human [desire] and secondly, faithfulness has different meaning[s] for different people. At the end of the day, it’s an equation that couples customise for themselves. It has to be mutually accepted value.”
‘The Ultimatum: Queer Couple’ is streaming on Netflix.
Note: Pseudonyms are used to protect the privacy of participants.
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