My girlfriend Nancy and I got married twice. Once by ourselves at City Hall in Somerville, and again a few months later with our friends and some family on Cape Cod. Even after two weddings, it took me a long time to get used to calling her my wife.
My last girlfriend had a friend who, for a lesbian, was strangely obsessed with marriage. She proposed to a girl on their third or fourth date, even though same-sex marriage was far from legal at the time, and she always referred to me and my girlfriend as each other's wives. All of this made me cringe. It seemed pointless to have a wedding when you couldn't be married, and I didn't want to be or have a wife. In fact, one of the best things about being gay was not being under any pressure to get married.
Most of the weddings I'd been to at that point in my life had been impersonal, conventional affairs that didn't do justice to the truly equal partnerships being celebrated. It was disappointing to see my smart, at least sort-of feminist friends give in to the traditions of white dress wearing, bouquet tossing, and name taking, before dancing to the inevitable wedding anthem "Brick House". (She knows she got everything a woman needs to get a man... 36-24-36, what a winning hand!) For centuries, weddings were transactions, the handing of property from one man to another, turning girls from daughters into wives. In virtually every ritual of the modern American wedding, you can feel the weight of that history bearing down.
When I was a teenager, I never entertained fantasies of being a bride. Instead I imagined myself a divorced single parent with a vegetable garden. The garden was important, for some reason, although I grew up into a person who can't even keep a cactus alive. My parents have been married for almost 35 years. Divorce seemed exotic to me, and also I had trouble picturing the husband. I dated boys in high school (the alternative hadn't yet occurred to me) but spend my whole life with one? It seemed unlikely even then.
We were the 142nd gay couple to be married in Somerville. The City Clerk had rewritten the ceremony a few months earlier to make it work equally well for same-sex and opposite-sex couples. He'd done a good job. The vows were moving but not sentimental. They were full of respect. It was only the three of us in the Aldermen's chambers, but it felt like a proper wedding. After the ceremony, Nancy and I had afternoon tea at the Ritz with champagne and petits fours and a harpist. It was the loveliest and most rebellious day of my life.
In private, Nancy and I called each other my wife with amazement. But in public the word still made me uncomfortable. I didn't know what to call her. Girlfriend sounded insignificant now; partner too businesslike. I'd been out for years, and I'd always felt lucky not to be straight. So why did I suddenly feel self-conscious? Was it just that I associated the word with housework and patriarchy? Or was there a small part of me that wasn't convinced our marriage was real?
A friend told me that when Linda McCartney died after 30 years of marriage in which they'd spent only one night apart, Paul said 'I've lost my girlfriend and that is very sad.' When I realized that if I still thought of Nancy as my girlfriend in thirty years it would mean our marriage had been a success, I stopped worrying so much and called her whatever I felt like calling her: my girlfriend, my partner, Nancy, and then occasionally, experimentally, my wife.
The past three years in Massachusetts have proven that time and familiarity are effective weapons against bigotry. More than 10,000 gay couples have married, and the sanctity of the state's straight marriages appears to have held up. Not only is our divorce rate still the lowest in the nation; it's been declining even faster since same-sex marriage was made legal. Meanwhile in the states most hostile to gay marriage, already-high divorce rates have continued to increase.
This month more than 75% of our state legislators voted against a constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage. All of the legislators who changed their votes in the last year said they did so because of personal stories they heard from their constituents, including a grandmother concerned that if one of her young grandchildren grew up to gay he or she wouldn't be able to marry, and another woman in her 70s who'd changed her own mind about the issue after a gay married couple moved in next door and started mowing her lawn. If marriage were made illegal, she said, the men would move away and then who would take care of her lawn? A recent Pew survey found that people who knew that a family member or friend was gay were roughly twice as likely to support marriage and other rights for gay people. That's why, unless we risk our safety or our lives by doing so, it's our responsibility to come out and stay out, which means coming out in small ways over and over again.
Now I call Nancy my wife all the time. And when I do? Please forgive the cliché, but I feel proud.
