“Gay people will fall in love and make homes together, as we always have. Marriage equality is about whether straight people are going to recognize those relationships.”
Jane Rigby, Washington Post
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At my wife’s brother’s wedding in July, my wife’s aunt and I talked about our weddings. We compared minor disasters (bad directions to the church, no-show caterers), and she asked what surprised me most. I paused. “The minister’s homily was about the couples she’d been marrying all summer. That most had been together for 20, 30 years, and what we should learn from them. At eight years, we were her shortest-duration couple. That surprised me. Oh, and the crying. We had 20 people at our wedding, and they were sobbing.”
My wife and I were legally married in California in 2008, the summer of marriage equality, after the California Supreme Court ruling that allowed same-sex marriages in May and before Proposition 8 outlawed them again that November. Because of Prop 8’s high-profile journeythrough the courts, I’m frequently asked about my marital status. Occasionally I still get the awkward, “So, are you and Andrea still together?,” but most people notice the wedding ring and put it something like this: “You got married — that’s great! Wait, is your marriage legal?”
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