Mark's Cafe Moi: And now that we can marry . . . the hard part

Marriage is a very serious business. Frank and I both know we’ll be together until one of us dies, and if we’re lucky that will be at the same time (though I know those odds are slim). We have a registered domestic partnership for New York City, framed in a glass cabinet in the living room. I’d suggested several times we drive to Greenwich, CT, and just get married. No, he said, he wanted to wait until we could get married where we live, here in New York. And now it’s happened. It’s interesting, funny, and challenging to have to suddenly think about the realities of being married. It’s something that would never have even entered the minds of me and my partner Jim, who died in 1991. Same-sex marriage (or, for the sake of search engines, gay marriage), was a preposterous idea to just about everyone. Not because we didn’t want it, but because we never thought it would happen in our lifetimes. Rather than deal with that depressing reality, I told myself that marriage was for people with too little imagination. That it was passé, bourgeois. But there remained in me that 10 year old gay boy who used to sit on my parents’ bed watching soap operas and fantasizing that one day it would be me greeting my husband at the end of a work day. Now that boy is back. Frank seems a little nervous, wondering how marriage might change our relationship. I told him the domestic partnership certificate on the shelf didn’t change our relationship. It made it just a little more legally solid, but we knew we were in this for the long haul. And marriage won’t change it either, at least not for the worse. People worry that they’ll stop being friends if they get married, or they’ll fall out of love, or the life they’ve decided to spend together will now be based on obligation – that it will somehow stop being a choice. That’s a nice way to think if you could get married in the first place. It’s great for straight couples for whom the option was always there to reject. We, on the other hand, are gazing into history . This is something most of us never seriously considered because it was a pipe dream, a fool’s errand. Not anymore. It’s okay to be nervous. It’s okay to ask yourself if it’s the right thing to do . . . because you know it is. I’ll let you see the photos from City Hall, hopefully soon.]]>