Proud and Legal

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Blogging for LGBT Families Day

Today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day so this member of an LGBT family is going to talk about marriage. But first, a quote:

Mawwiage. Mawwiage is what bwings us togethew today. Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement, that dweam within a dweam. And wove, twue wove, wiww fowwow you fowevah and evah… So tweasuwe youw wove…Have you the wing?

I have no idea why that routine is so funny, but it is. Go figure. At the same time, I’m have no idea why people fall in love, but they do. And it’s wonderful. Well, it can be awful, actually, but if it works out it’s wonderful.

I’ve been in love a number of times in my life, and it’s been a mixed bag. Probably like most people, love has made me happy, sad, ecstatic, miserable, euphoric, depressed, angry, crazy, content, and just about every other adjective in the dictionary. But, until I met Amy, I never really understood why people got married. It always seemed to me that people mostly got married because they thought they were supposed to, or to have someone to do half the child-raising chores. My relationships are what they are, I figured – why do I need the church, or worse, the state, telling me how to define them? I still feel that way, to some degree. Neither the church nor the state nor any one else except Amy and I (well, now maybe our daughter, too) can define our relationship.

But falling in love with Amy made me, for the first time in my life, understand how you can love somebody so much that you need to shout it from the rooftops, spend thousands of dollars on a party, have friends fly all the way there from faraway places, proclaim publicly and loudly and openly and joyously that you will spend forever and ever and even longer with this incredibly wonderful person, and to tell the world how incredibly amazingly lucky you are to have found your true love and soul mate.

So, that’s what we did, three years ago, and it was wonderful. Except that it wasn’t legal. Well, we figured, fuck the government and their stupid-ass laws. That doesn’t make us any less married. It makes us less protected, less accepted, less financially secure, but it doesn’t change our relationship with each other.

But now, or soon anyway, we can get married here in California. And even though we’re already married, and even though it’s a little annoying to be “granted” something that is your right, we will get married again. Because I still want to shout it from the rooftops and proclaim publicly and loudly and openly and joyously that I will spend forever and ever and longer with this incredibly wonderful person, and I’m still incredibly amazingly lucky to have found her. I’ll forgo making my friends fly here and spending thousands on a party, though.

Who in their right mind could possibly deny us this?