The reason we were so used to being together is because by that point we’d been together just a whisker under 18 years, and had been in a civil union—for which we had a big ceremony for 4¾ years. I used to joke that we had the wedding 4¾ years before we were married, but that means asking people to think about the joke, and that’s seldom a good idea.
While it really didn’t change anything about the way we lived our daily lives, it nevertheless cemented our legal place as a family, and it did so in a way that everyone could understand, neither of which was completely true of civil unions or just living together as we’d done for so many years. As I often point out, it made us equal to the heterosexuals in our lives, and that mattered a lot, probably more than I thought it would—until it did.
So, five years ago today, “we achieved the ordinariness that our heterosexual friends and family always took for granted,” as I put it last year. But, to borrow from what I also said last year, to me, that ordinariness doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that I’ve spent another year married to the person I love most in this world. And that was what the whole long wait and the struggle for marriage equality was ALWAYS all about.
I often say that love always wins in the end, and it does. But sometimes it needs a helping hand and a whole lot of hard work to help it win. Nowadays, it’ll also require a lot of defensive work to protect what we have from those who would take it from us. Love is worth the hard work. It’s one of the few things in this world that truly is.
Previously
Fourth Anniversary (2017)
Third Anniversary (2016)
Second Anniversary (2015)
Still married (2014)
Related
To be married
Husband and husband
Just one more
The photo up top is of our wedding rings, which I took the morning of October 31, 2013. Unlike most of my other photos on this blog, this one is copyright, all rights reserved. Of course.
1 comment:
happy, merry marriage!
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