Still relevant today...

Okay, so I was cleaning out files on my work laptop and found the blog below. I am guessing I typed it to post of Myspace but it never happened...better late than never I guess.

I don’t believe there is any real shock value in the fact that I believe that the right to wed should be one afforded to all consenting adults who wish to commit their lives to one another inclusive of all the legal rights and protections that come along with it.

It enrages me to no limit that I am treated as a second class citizen and that my marriage to my Wife is used as a scare tactic to get uneducated yokels out of their caves and into the voting booths to cast their ballot for whatever hate-monger is running for office.

So with that out there, time to blog what I came to blog about…

A while back some friends and I were out to dinner. One friend had the revelation that the Wife and I were the only married homos she knew. She and I started discussing why that was. I had quite a few cocktails that evening and can’t remember what we came up with but I’ve not stopped thinking about this since then.

I know other married gay couples, and when I say married I mean they held a ceremony committing themselves to one another in front of witnesses and their respective Gods. Some ceremonies were small others were on a grander scale, hell I’ll even count the one who didn’t really have an actually ceremony but in a private moment exchanged words of commitments and rings and had a surprise party afterwards to celebrate. So that makes 4 couples counting us. 4 out of all of our friends, their friends, their friends’ friends, etc. 4 out of every single homo I know.

Why is that? I know plenty of committed couples, too many to even count. So why is it that so few of them are married? I recently heard about another long term couple’s relationship biting the dust. 7 years together and it has ended. It makes me sad for them on so many levels. It seems I’ve witnessed a lot of these sorts of break-ups over the past couple of years. Couples with anywhere from 2 to 7 years together ending their relationships and moving on.

99% of them cohabitated and lived their life as a married couple but in reality none of them were married. Don’t get me wrong, they had deep commitments and ones that I respected and thought were life-long, but none of them took that final step.

When one of the couples went their separate ways one of our mutual (and straight) friends asked me if I thought it ended because they weren’t married. “Don’t you think that kind of commitment keeps people together?” I couldn’t help but think yes.

I do believe that marriage is a commitment stronger than any other in this world. It is the start of a family even if that family never grows any larger. Is there a social unit stronger than the family?

Look, I know marriages end. I know that the society in which we live in thinks it okay to turn marriage into a game show where two total strangers tie the knot. I also know a lot of people marry someone because it is expected of them by their family or social circle. But lets face it, for gay couples it is different. We get married in spite of what our families or our society says. We have those ceremonies even if only one freaking state out of 50 will legally recognize it.

Now granted, I’ve only been married a couple of years but I can tell you that after living with this woman for 6 years that the past 2 have by far been the best. Not because we’ve gotten along any better or seen eye to eye more often. If anything, picking out wedding pictures and paying for them can take you to whole new levels of frustration.

The reason these years have been better has been because we are married. Because we are a family and we now have a tie that binds us to one another through the wonderful, the trying and the seemingly impossible.

The morning after our wedding a woman told me “You’re going to love marriage, it’s just a great place to be.” I just hope for all my gay friends that they don’t give up on the dream of getting married, of taking that final step and getting to that truly amazing place that marriage takes you.

I would like to say that since writing this we now know one more married couple and have 2 sets of gay friends that are engaged and are planning a ceremony...things are looking up. Or maybe I just need to be more patient.