First Comes Love

Tom Rasmussen finds themselves straddling two camps, that of their Northern, working class family for whom marriage is the centrepiece of life, and that as a male-bodied, non-binary queer in a relationship with a man. Through journeys to wildly different weddings ranging from the most traditional to the unrecognizably unorthodox, visits to wedding planners, interviews of the much-married, those who have questioned their decision to marry over lockdown, or those who would never consider matrimony, these incisive witty and often moving essays look at marriage as an achievement, a compromise, a selling-out, and a practical solution. They examine what marriage means, along the whole spectrum of sexuality, for the working class, the middle class, the upper class and what the future looks like for marriage, the most historic and universal of institutions.