My present blogging view (this is Cazenovia Lake, which is right down the street from our wedding location):
As I write this, one month ago today, NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Marriage Equality Bill into law. I blogged about how amazing it was for Dave and me to watch this all unfold live. Today we are hearing about the many already committed couples going to get their marriage licenses and the sense of love and equality in the air can only make us smile.
But even with all this good, I have this lingering sense that people are now thinking about our wedding differently – or to the point – more legitimately. Laws do not change the love between two people…it does not make it stronger nor does it make it more real. What it does do is to codify what we and many others have always known is true – that we should be able to be free to choose our partner and marry that person without interruption or interference from others. But for some I think they are more able to ‘get on board’ now with us having the wedding because it is legal….as if prior we were wasting our money and time. We had planned on going to Connecticut to get married after the wedding and none of our family thought it necessary to be with us…but some have said “you need to have someone there to legally marry you…we want to see that.” And I know what they mean and I know it is because they love us…but having it legal or not does not change the fact that Dave and I will be sharing our love with them and that is what the marriage ceremony is about…it is not only about signing a document that says I can now claim David as my husband.
When people say that to me, it makes me wonder what they thought about our wedding prior to this…did they think it was some kind of stick and twig ceremony that was only meant to show how gay we are? Nothing about our ceremony will change save for trying to get a justice of the peace there to do the legal bit of it. So why the need to think of it different. And why does that texture, of the justice of the peace, some how amplify the joy of the day. For me that is a clinical piece of the wedding….kind of like having people watch me get dressed. But….maybe I am down playing all of that. Maybe the fact that it is legal and that people want to be there for that part means they want to say “we have always thought this to be true, we have always wanted this for you, and now we want to be there to see it happen.”
And I think that maybe my issue is not external but internal. Maybe I have been the one who started to think of the wedding differently. I know this will sound bad, but some part of me wishes Dave and I were starting now. It might be a pragmatic thing – trying to find someone to do our wedding on such short notice on labor day weekend has not been easy. But another part of me thinks that all those feelings we had in the beginning about whether people will consider it a ‘real’ wedding would have not of been a worry. We could have stepped into this process as authentic as the next couple…and maybe that is what I am lamenting. Maybe my issues with how other people have been talking about our wedding now taps into my fundamental fear that people did not consider our wedding real from the get-go. I don’t believe that to be true, I really think people just want to see us get legally married, but I am not going to lie and say it does not give me pause when some talk about it with more legitimate terminology.
I know people may think me ungrateful for not being totally over the moon in this blog post given the subject. But my issue is not with the passage , that is an amazing piece of history, but rather, I am just trying to reconcile why the passing of a law, which does not change how Dave and I feel about each other, somehow changes the concept of our wedding; in both my mind and others.
Maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but, frankly, it does not matter right? We will do as we have done and we will be as we have been.
Michael,
I just wanted to take a moment and share my thoughts on this matter from personal experience.
My now wife and I planned to have our wedding this coming October, and found it was a constant struggle to get people to treat our wedding no different than anyone else’s. We live in FL, where legal same-sex marriage isn’t an option, so our intention was to have our wedding at home, with our loved ones, and kick off our honeymoon with a trip to a courthouse where we could legalize it. Once we sent our save the dates, we discovered that people were calling our wedding a celebration, party, commitment ceremony, etc (since the wedding we were inviting them to attend was not a legally binding one), and those things bothered us.
After facing these issues for several months, we planned a ‘mental health’ vacation — a chance for us to take a break from wedding planning and spend some quality time together. It was on that vacation that we decided to have a small, legal wedding ceremony on the side of a mountain at a private lesbian resort (and in our JEANS). It was more than we could have ever dreamed of, and looking back, the only thing we would have done differently is that we planned to do that sooner rather than later.
We’re still going to have a reception here at home on our original wedding date in October, where we can celebrate with our loved ones, but our wedding day got to be amazing and just about us!
Kaleigh: We have heard our wedding referred to as the same thing “celebration” etc etc. and it is hard not to take offense to that. Your ceremony seemed perfect and exactly what it is all about – the two of you being with each other! Congrats! (oh, I love that you both were in jeans!)
We live in NYC and have been engaged since 2/28/10, the whole time planning a CT wedding. Now everyone is asking us “oh man, doesn’t it suck that after a year and a half of planning your wedding, it could have been done in NY after all? are you going to change your plans?” what? why would ANYTHING about us getting married “suck” and why would we change our plans?? We chose a beautiful and affordable venue and feel good about contributing to the economy of a state who has recognized us throughout our engagement.
It is WONDERFUL that NY has legalized it…but that changes nothing about our already-planned day. And in fact, we did our legal ceremony in Queens on 7/24. Originally our legal bit would have been done in CT on 8/21. We CHOSE to separate that so we could be a part of something huge in NYC, so our actual wedding day will actually be missing that component and most people in attendance won’t even be aware of that.
Your wedding is close!…ours is 9/3/11. Congrats! I like how you decided to have in CT and your reasons. Enjoy your day!
Thank you for posting about this! We live in California and with all the hoopla about Prop 8 going around, it’s not uncommon to have a conversation related to our wedding where it comes up. People usually say, including my lovely others’ father, ‘oh, you are getting married because of the whole Prop 8 thing, right”? I take offense to that.
Our wedding is not because of Prop 8. Prop 8 did not push us to get married or even engaged! We were together during that short time of legality, then also when it was over turned and still, our wedding isn’t until June of next year. The way people correlate our wedding/marriage to the passing/over-turning/big legal mess that is Prop 8 is frustrating.
Congratulations to you on your upcoming wedding! I am positive it will be amazing! I hope it’s everything you want it to be and more!
Leah: I hear ya! Part of me hates that people think we just threw ours together the day after it passed, when we have been planning this for well over a year!
Thanks; it is one month, 2 hours and 20 minutes from now, but who is counting?….;-)