What Marriage Means to Me

From the time I was six years old, I knew I would never marry. I never fantasized about being a bride when I was younger, I never dreamed about my wedding day or about my wedding dress, and I never identified with the girls and women in movies who fell in love with and were whisked off to the happy future by their Prince Charming.  I remember the day that I had this realization about my future. I was standing on the front porch of my house growing up. My mother made some off-handed comment that I would grow up and get married one day, and my stomach fell because I knew that she was wrong. Even at that young age I knew, with a conviction that I can’t explain but felt as deeply rooted in me as my left-handedness, that such an innocuous vision of my future might have been appropriate for other girls, but it was not, and never would be mine. Because I was just not the sort of girl for whom that future was meant.

During most of my childhood, adolescence, and teenage years. I thought of myself as broken. Not just because I loathed dresses, the colors pink and purple, princesses, jewelry, sparkles, bows, and jelly shoes, and not just because I was a tomboy who would rather have simply been, on most days, a boy (I don’t think I actually truly wanted to be a boy, though I was unsure about that for many years), but because I knew, with increasing self-hatred and desperation, that I just wasn’t the way a girl “should” be. It was like I was plunked in a room full of girls, except I was alone, looking at the others from behind a glass wall.

After my mother made her comment about me getting married, I decided two things: 

1) Because I was broken, I would probably only ever disappoint everyone in my entire life, including me.

2) Case in point: Mom hoped I would grow up to marry one day. Marriage though was something reserved for real girls. Not for me.

Fast forward a couple of years to when I came out of the closet. For the first time in my eighteen years of life, instead of shame, disgust and disappointment for my failure to be a ‘real’ girl, I experienced a strange new sensation. I found peace. I found myself. For the first time in my life, I no longer felt broken. For the first time in my life, it felt right to be me.

Fast forward another few years. I meet Gina. She makes my heart flip and my stomach dip and we fall in love. She is my strength, my solace, my support. She is my heart’s chosen life partner. And because we live in Massachusetts, and it is 2009, we can do something I never believed would be part of my life’s path.  We can marry.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Massachusetts.

This is what being able to marry Gina means to me:

1) Being able to marry whom I love publicly honors and celebrates that love by allowing me to claim the very word marriage. There is a reason weddings are thrown for marriage, and not for Continued Committed Domestic Partnership Tuesday.

2) Being able to marry whom I love removes the glass wall separating me from the ‘real’ girls. It validates me as a real girl too.

3) Being able to marry whom I love validates my love and my commitment to Gina as equal to anybody else’s love for a spouse.

4) Being able to marry whom I love lets me live openly, freely, and fully as the person I am, have always been, and will always be.

4)Being allowed to marry whom I love realizes, acknowledges, and affirms me as full human who is equal. Not less than.

With the cases before the supreme court yesterday and today, marriage equality has been forefront in the news, and you can guess what side I am on. I have heard the debates from those I agree with, and I have listened to the debates from those I disagree with. Both have honest, passionate cases to argue. I have my own thoughts and wishes for how the court might decide the prop 8 and DOMA cases before them. Never before have I felt so personally connected to such a seminal moment in our country’s history. Never before has the political felt so personal.  I use the term ‘marriage equality’ deliberately, because from my sensibility, the issues being debated in the supreme court right now are fundamentally about equality. Equality in marriage, and equality for all citizens of the United States. I believe the side I am on will eventually prove to be the right side of history because I believe it is a cause that strives towards basic equality in humans. This has always been the forward march of our history. This has always been the forward march of our humanity.