REVIEW: Books: First Come Love by Tom Rasmussen

First Come Love

Tom Rasmussen

This is a charming book; by turns funny, educational, historically illuminating, jaw dropping and written with a warm and informative style which delighted me. Author Rasmussen, who has quite the interesting life outside of writing, has spent rather a lot of time obsessing over and researching, interviewing, attending, examining, asking and wondering about Marriage, and lays out of some of their findings in this seriously funny look at the way we’ve changed in our attitudes to this most ancient of institutions. Although droll, Rasmussen is relentlessly respectful, allowing us to draw our own conclusion of some of the challenging ideas and people they come across in their adventures into matrimony, certainly pausing and letting us consider contradiction or confusion but always bringing it back to personal experience and real people, talking about their own lives and how they build relationships which works for them. All the while offering up a side-line in personal observation which pushed this book a little further into ‘I love reading this’ territory.

We are asked to consider marriage as an achievement, a compromise, a selling-out, a practical solution and given experiences of authentic lives of what marriage means to a range of people across the spectrum of sexuality and class, and what the future looks like for this most historic and universal of institutions.

Rasmussen holds up this carved glass bowl of performative social affirmation, turns it around in their careful hands, letting the light of a rather crystal sharp and witty mind bounce off the deeply incised carved patterns, pointing out heritage and novelty, wear and provenance, and then settles it down again, with a glint in their eye and a ‘what now’. First Comes Love is a welcome, queer centred examination of marriage and the people who choose to embrace it, and a few who never, ever, will.