Last week I got to share some super exciting news – that Anne and I will be one of two couples getting officially, legally, 4realz married in NYC on 8/25 at the Yay! NY event hosted by A Practical Wedding and Lowe House Designs, to benefit Lambda Legal (be sure to get your tickets if you’re in the area!). Our immediate families are both going to be able to make it, I found a cute dress, we’re going to NY next week to apply for our marriage license. This is all awesome. Really exciting stuff! But…. it has brought with it an interesting set of issues and concerns, which were touched on by Michael’s post this week about his is-legal-more-legitimate wedding coming up shortly. Just as he has struggled with the idea of whether his wedding to his partner is made more or less “real” in the eyes of themselves, their friends, and their families now that it will be legal in their home state, Anne and I keep coming back to whether our legal wedding on 8/25 makes our “real” wedding on 9/25 more or less real? We’ve been afraid that the legal wedding will somehow detract from our ceremony in September. Or that our legal wedding doesn’t really count since we don’t live in NY and won’t really benefit from any of the legal rights we’d be otherwise granted in that state. And, I’ve feared that means in some way the NY legal wedding isn’t really real, because those rights won’t be recognized in our home state or 40+ other states in this country. What’s real about a piece of paper that’s only good within state lines? What’s real about a wedding that comes a month after we’ve signed on the dotted line? And does having more than one wedding take away from either, or add to both?
We’ve made some choices to help us distinguish the two events, philosophically and logistically. We decided only to invite immediate family to NY, and rather than write any personal vows or select meaningful readings we plan to stick to the bare bones legal wedding ceremony. In PA, we are inviting lots of friends and family and plan to craft a very personalized, sentimental ceremony that serves as our promises to each other. Both will be celebratory in their own ways – NY will mean cake and champagne on a terrace, a nice dinner with our families, and then a dance party with a bunch of strangers, while our PA wedding is going to be filled with the love of all of our families and friends, eating, drinking, dancing, and spending time together. Both mark a major commitment to a life together. But this is where it gets tricky – our NY wedding will be legally binding, and come with paperwork and notaries, made real by that marriage certificate stamped by some clerk in a strange city hall, made real because some people who never met us put it to a vote. And when we get married in PA, our wedding will be a symbolic gesture, made real by the witness and loving support of the friends and family who will help us uphold our commitment, made real by our words to each other. So that leaves me wondering – What is it that makes a marriage, and makes it real?
Since I’m still really piecing these thoughts together in my head, I thought I’d open this up for a discussion that we can continue in the coming weeks, while I work on figuring out what a marriage means to me and Anne. I would love for you to comment and engage each other in this discussion, single, engaged, married, divorced, whatever. What makes a marriage? What role does legality play in marriage in general, and for you specifically? Do your thoughts change when you think of the population at large vs. yourself? Would your thoughts change if you were or were not in a state that honors marriage equality? Where does religion fit? Family? Children? What does a wedding have to do with marriage? How have you decided that marriage (and/or a wedding) is/is not the right choice for you?
So, have at it in the comments. Please be respectful of what are bound to be varied opinions on the matter. But be thoughtful and honest, because that’s when I think we can learn and grow the most from our interactions with each other.
It’s a tricky question, isn’t it? We had our (non-legal) wedding with friends and family in Chicago, and then went to Boston to make it legal. I didn’t feel that either ceremony detracted from the other – they were both very special.
If you think about it, regardless of whether your wedding is a legally-binding ceremony or not, what makes you married is that the two of you declare your intentions in front of at least one witness. In Chicago, the witnesses were our friends and family, and we asked them to sign a wedding license that we created; and to commit to upholding our marriage in spite of the lack of legal recognition. And that was awesome.
In Boston, with our Justice of the Peace and a few friends who happened to live there, we had a lovely and intimate gathering, and when we were declared married by the state of Massachusetts, that was really awesome too.
I have two thoughts about it, really. One – aren’t we lucky that we got to marry each other twice? And have two completely different weddings that were both amazing? And Two – it’s kinda like all those straight couples who have a destination wedding, but get married legally in the states before or after, because the paperwork/laws in the destination are too big of a pain in the butt. In our case, our “destination” is home, and the laws don’t work for us… so we got married where we could and had our wedding where we wanted to. Same thing, really.
Cindy: I like how you talk about the destination wedding as being similar…I guess the difference is how people talk about it…in that case it is a pragmatic thing, but for many gay couples people just think it is not the same until it is legal and thus the reason for getting married is less rational…obviously I don’t agree with that, but I think some do. But you make a very good point. And I love that you had your guests sign your wedding certificate…what a great idea!
A difficult question to be sure.
For Charlie and I, we tend to refer to our legal wedding differently than our “real” wedding. When we flew to Boston (since California didn’t want our money), we basically eloped. It was a great weekend, just the two of us over Valentine’s. We celebrated and loved and were legal for a couple months before we had our real wedding.
To us, the Boston trip was a technicality. If we could have been legally married in California we would’ve done the whole thing together, ceremony and legal marriage. Instead, our “real” wedding was the one we shared with our families and friends. It was infinitely more “real” with our loved ones there’s to witness our commitment to one another.
legal or not, your wedding and commitment to each other will be what you make of it. i think it’s pretty easy to get caught up in the details and forget the purpose, but i know you both are being very conscientious of that. in the end, it doesn’t matter who all is there, what state approves of it, or whether everything goes perfect. your love is what makes it all real and binds you together. as long as you have each other, you’ve got it all!
We went through this same internal struggle when it was legalized in NY, our home state, on June 24 (my birthday!) and we had an August 21 Connecticut wedding planned for 16 months. We debated getting the legal bit done here on July 24 because we couldn’t resist making history and just being a part of that. Plus it’s my fiancee’s home state (mine is SC, which opens a whole host of emotional issues around this for me) and she said the idea of being able to get her marriage certificate here in her home state was really exciting.
My only hesitation was, like you mention, being afraid that our August wedding wouldn’t feel the same after having been married for almost a month already. I was really worried about that. What if it felt like we were just going through the motions? What if after ALL this planning and excitement, it’s anticlimactic and I don’t feel very emotional?
My wedding is still a week and a half away, but I’m 99.9% confident that I have nothing to worry about. Because as special as our legal ceremony was, I’ve already forgotten about it in the hustle and bustle of preparing for our “real” wedding. We had a great day–we had only my best friend, her mother, her sister, her aunt, and one of her friends. I bought a little white cocktail dress, and she wore her Mets jersey, and we went to the Queens courthouse where we were in and out in about 30 minutes. We exchanged rings, but took them off again that night. We just let them go through their standard ceremony rather than having any personalized pieces.
And you know what? Even though I did all this to minimize the impact of this day (in order to maximize the impact of Aug 21), it was still really, really special. I was still emotional and crying and floating on cloud 9. We all walked back to the diner by our apartment and had brunch, and then that night we went to a community reception being held at the LGBT center where we shared a first dance with at least 30 other couples who had just been married that day. And we wore our “just married” sashes all the way home.
But you know what? the next day we went to work without our rings, without the congratulations of our friends and colleagues (most of whom didn’t know we were doing this) and life immediately returned to normal. We didn’t have even one day for a “honeymoon” or other type of private celebration. And ever since, we have been caught up in the excitement and busy-ness of wedding planning for August, so much so that it often slips my mind that we’re already married.
And to be perfectly honest, the legal bit has never been the most important part of a wedding ceremony to me. It’s important for our futures, but any benefits bestowed isn’t why I’m marrying her, as I would be marrying her even if I were still in SC. It’s about celebrating our commitment in front of family and friends. That has always been the most important thing. That doesn’t mean our legal ceremony wasn’t also real, because we were celebrating with our few witnesses there too, and we were making commitments to each other. Instead of struggling so much about which would be “real” like I did for a long time, I’m just embracing the great fortune at being able to do this twice, both in their own special ways.
We consider our big wedding (white dress, custom suit, friends, invites, etc) as our “real” wedding even though it isn’t our legal wedding. Our legal wedding is just that and it too was wonderful. To us, that was a day to celebrate the legality. The wedding was a day to celebrate our commitment and relationship.
We got legally married in Massachusetts about six weeks before our “real” wedding in Minnesota. We did it that way because we wanted to be legally married (we expect to someday move to one of several states in New England where it is recognized), wanted to have the legalities taken care of before the real wedding, and wanted to be able to display our marriage certificate at our ceremony in Minnesota.
The only shared element between the two was that we used the same vows we’d written for both ceremonies. We liked tying the two together in that way, and we felt it was a little strange to promise one set of things in September and a different set in November.
The ceremony we had in MA was nice but a little surreal. We had just a couple of family members present, we didn’t exchange rings, and afterward we went out for a nice dinner. It was nice, but it felt nothing like a wedding, and that was okay. Our real wedding in MN was a meaningful ceremony in the church my wife grew up in, followed by a lovely party with lots of our family and friends who were there to support us. After the legal wedding was so surreal and didn’t leave us feeling any different the next day, we’d been a little concerned that maybe the real wedding wouldn’t feel real either, but it did. That day in November in Minnesota was our wedding, no matter what any government record might have to say about it.