Something Old, Nothing New

Honoring the fourteen years my fiancé and I shared before we won the right to marry.

I’ve been touched by the overwhelming response to my recent essay about putting an end to “gay marriage.” Family, friends, and people I’ve never met have gone out of their way to let me know that they share my feelings, and to wish my fiancé and me the start of a happy and secure life together.

Much as I appreciate the good wishes for our future as a couple, it feels strange to receive them now, because the fact is that we already have a solid and wonderful life together.

Who and What Marriage Is For

It got me thinking about marriage, and what it really symbolizes. On the one hand, marriage is something private and intimate shared between two people who have realized that they love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives celebrating that fact. But marriage is just as much about two people affirming that commitment publicly, out in the marketplace, as it is about them expressing their personal love and dedication to each other.

I have to confess that I’m having a hard time figuring out how getting married at this point in our lives will change anything for us personally. The way we have defined ourselves and what we are to each other has always cut against the grain of the sanctioned relationships that were officially recognized. And after fourteen years of struggling to put a name to the very real and solid relationship we actually have, it’s unsettling at this point in our lives to be adopting a predefined term for everything that is to come. It’s almost as if we’re pretending that this is the beginning of something new, and nothing that went before counts.

Weddings are traditionally about two people establishing a joint identity, and planning a new phase of their lives together. When we were at that stage in our relationship, there was no way for us to do that legally, so we just dug out our own channel and pushed forward with our lives. Now that we’ve been invited to merge our private stream into the mighty river of marriage, it’s difficult to reconcile the young newlywed image implied by a wedding ceremony with the comfortable and stable couple we have already matured into.

Not a New Beginning

I think that the disconnect between starting something exciting and new, and maintaining something wonderful that already exists, is the central reason why it’s been so frustrating deciding what kind of wedding made sense for us. A wedding is usually an elaborate public affirmation of budding love and commitment, held before friends and family, conveying the blessings of the government and any chosen religious or spiritual institutions. Weddings symbolize the joining together of two people who were previously separate, and have now chosen to be recognized as two halves of a whole.

That’s not us. We’re already united. We have been for years. It’s simply taken too long for our social institutions to give our status a label.

It isn’t as if we always had the choice about whether to get married. There are plenty of couples who stay together for years before exercising their rights and deciding—from that day forward—to be bound together as a married couple. For them, marriage is truly a transformation, and one worth celebrating. For us, legal marriage is a welcome acknowledgement of who we are and how we have chosen to live our lives, but it doesn’t introduce anything new.

The Implications of a Grand Wedding

Perhaps that’s why we’ve elected to consecrate our marriage without ceremony. We’ve asked my father to become ordained so he can officiate at a private signing of our marriage contract. My mother and sister have agreed to act as witnesses. We’re not inviting any guests, or throwing any elaborate receptions. We may go out for pizza afterward. It’s a minimum viable wedding; just enough to translate what we have had for so many years into something the rest of society can name.

Getting married now, at the convenience of the courts, will never replace the wedding we might have been able to enjoy if we had been able to get married when we originally recognized the inevitable and delicious conspiracy that brought us together. At this point, as an established couple, we are simply accepting this opportunity to affirm that, yes, what we have is the same thing everyone else recognizes as a marriage. We’ll wear the rings and file the joint tax returns. But although public recognition is something new, for us this isn’t actually the start of anything.

Sure, I wish we could have fully experienced the glamour and pomp of a lavish wedding when it was appropriate for us. And I tingle with delight when I see other gay couples finally release their pent-up creative juices, pumping out extravagant wedding celebrations in billows of taffeta and showers of rice, right into the faces of anyone who would dare to try and stop them again. I want to cry and dance and sing at every wedding I see.

But we’ve decided that a big wedding would feel anticlimactic to us; almost dismissive of all the years of love and devotion we‘ve already shared. It wouldn’t reflect where we are and what we have. And regardless of how we got here, I couldn’t be happier, because I get to stay with the man I love for the rest of my life—either way!

Not the Last

I’m glad to accept the good wishes we’ve received. And in return, I’ll share my wish that we could be the last ones to navigate these strange waters. Every young couple starting a new life together deserves the opportunity to fully and publicly acknowledge the awe and magnificence of the joyous adventure they are about to dive into.

Social change flows at its own pace, and we make the ripples we can while it carries us along. I sincerely hope that we will live to see a time when all couples will get to partake in the thrill of being married legally, openly, and elaborately, at the appropriate point in their lives and their relationships.