Having started writing a post on marriage twice and both times having those posts devolve into writing about our wedding instead of our marriage, I really had to stop and question myself. Why is it so hard for me to talk about my pending marriage, yet so easy to talk about the wedding?
Partially this is due to the second-class nature of same sex marriage in California. When Liz and I first started to talk about spending the rest of our lives together, 7 million people in our home state had just voted against us doing that very thing. At first, our attitude was “screw them, we’re going to have a big, traditional wedding, just like we’ve always imagined for ourselves and who cares what the government says.” We thought we would write up documents with a lawyer to make things as official as possible, but we weren’t too happy with the idea of accepting the state’s consolation prize of Domestic Partnership. But recently we heard about an elderly couple in Sonoma County who had all their official documents in place yet still were denied the right to see each other when one partner was dying, the state took control of their combined assets, sold their belongings and kicked the widowed partner out of his home. Legal documents just can’t protect you the same way a legal marriage can.
