Happy 3rd anniversary to my beloved wife
Sep. 20th, 2012 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfAs anyone who's been reading my sporadic rants on the subject, or who lives here in Minnesota, knows, the state constitution is on the brink of being altered to prevent us from ever getting married here or having our marriage recognized here. I, for one, am really sick of being told that we're not real, that we're a threat to anyone else's marriage and all the other shit that these amendment campaigns bring out of the woodwork.
So i'm asking everyone who reads this to do what they can to fight the amendment(s). Help us celebrate our anniversary by supporting MN United for All Families. And thank you for all that you do to fight fear and bigotry.
Below is the post I wrote for my friend Lisabet Sarai's blog, Beyond Romance, shortly after the big event.
“Married in Iowa...and the Five or Six Other Statelike Entities that Recognize It”
2009 was the year that put same-sex marriage on the public radar in the U.S. I have to admit that while my partner and I were supportive on the issue prior to last year, we hadn’t really considered as an option for us. We live in Minnesota, which has a very conservative governor and a legislature too afraid of him to push for legislation. Even if we got married elsewhere, none of the legal benefits of marriage would apply to us, so what was the point?
We had, on the other hand, been together for fifteen years as of January 15th, 2009 (Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, somewhat coincidentally), and we did register with the city of Minneapolis as domestic partners in February of 2009, so clearly we were thinking about it. In fact, given the longevity of our relationship, the shared cats, the house and so forth, we felt pretty married already. But then the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in favor of real and actual same sex marriage on April 27, 2009 and we had a shift in perspective.
One of my wife’s friends came up to visit from Iowa the day that the ruling came down. At dinner, she uttered the fateful words, “If you guys decide to do it, I want to be your flower girl.”
We looked at each other. We originally met in Iowa City, Iowa doing women’s country western line dancing in the Unitarian Society basement. We had friends there, eager to see this happen. We had already committed to each other. We also suspected that the better financial results that Iowa sees from “marriage tourism,” the more likely they are to keep it. We thought, “Why not?”
We mentioned it to a few friends. Next thing we knew, we had an officiant (a prominent local poet and all around great guy), a ring bearer, and most of the other components for a wedding party. Since Iowa has a three-day waiting period minimum between license application and ceremony, we took a road trip down to scenic Decorah, Iowa with our pal Rebecca as our witness. The court clerks were very charming about it, which made it all that much more lovely.
Next up, we found a nice park shelter in Iowa City and got everything to pretty much fall into place. Our friends made us a terrific soy wedding cake, in deference to our dairy allergies. And we got lovely silver rings from artist Laurie Edison.
The actual ceremony had about twenty guests at it and was wildly nondenominational. We committed to each other, but no one promised to obey and we dropped the references to richer and poorer. We had quotes from Ursula Le Guin and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I was not permitted to re-enact the wedding scene from the “The Princess Bride,” which was probably for the best. The weather and the bouquets held up splendidly, and we were pronounced “Spouse and Spouse.” The whole affair was, I must say, quite lovely, and we had a swell time.
The reception was two weeks later in Minneapolis in another park shelter. My mother made it in from NYC and we ended up with about forty guests total. Our local bakery and florists were quite excited about providing cake and flowers to their first lesbian reception, and did a lovely job with both. The weather was once again spectacular, which made us feel even more fortunate. And so we are now wed, at least according to the laws of Iowa and the other jurisdictions that acknowledge our status.
I keep being asked if it feels any different and I’d have to say yes and no. Our relationship is its usual festival of good-natured bickering and quality time so I wouldn’t say that’s any different. Something that has changed is how my wife’s family treats me. They are small town Utah-dwelling Mormons who have never ‘approved’ of our relationship, with one or two exceptions. They haven’t been horrible, at least to me, but I usually don’t figure much into their reality. Despite some rather enthusiastically expressed misgivings, they all stepped up and were quite supportive once it was clear that it was going to happen. I’ve had a number of notes and calls assuring me that I’m an acknowledged part of the family, which I will freely say, have been a bit surreal though kindly meant. There still an adjustment period: I’ve been calling her my partner for over a decade. “Wife” doesn’t come easily to me.
But overall, we’re thrilled that we were able to celebrate our love with the support and good wishes of our friends and family. We got to bring together a diverse group of folks of different genders, orientations, races, national origins, ages and religions to celebrate our relationship. So, thank you Iowa Supreme Court, for giving us the push we needed to go through with it.
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Date: 2012-09-21 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-25 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-21 01:35 pm (UTC)(I wasn't sure whether Iowa had an asshat like Romney trying to keep people from out of state from getting married. Romney did that in Massachusetts, invoking a 100+ year old law that was originally created to prevent interracial couples from coming to MA to get married.)
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Date: 2012-09-25 12:29 am (UTC)