Still married

Today Nigel and I have been married for one year. Guess that means the honeymoon’s over, eh? Well, falling just shy of our 19th anniversary together, I’d say we already passed that milestone years ago, right? And yet, here we are.

We have so many anniversaries to mark our relationship, as most gay couples do. But the anniversary of when we legally married—when we became the legal equivalents of our heterosexual siblings—is special in its own right. This anniversary will always lag behind the others in number, but its significance outshines them all because on this day one year ago, we became family in every legal sense of the word.

Sure, we were together long before we were married, and long before we had our less-than-marriage civil union, but by marrying we became more closely joined than had ever been possible before.

We wanted to exercise our new right to marry, sure, but we also wanted to set an example so that young LGBT people could see a future that we couldn’t even have imagined—certainly I never did. And that’s why we acknowledge the anniversary of our marriage, even though it was the better part of two decades after we were a couple: Marriage matters.

So, here we are, married one year. And they said it wouldn’t last! But, what did they say for the 18+ year before then? Oh, the same thing. Good we didn’t listen to the naysayers, eh?

And, I have to say, I’d marry my Nigel again any day—every day, if I could. My life with him is so exponentially/logarithmically better than it could have been without him that there simply is no other choice. That’s good!

Previously
Husband and husband
Just one more