Next month my wife, El, and I will be celebrating our second wedding anniversary. My father is gay. He and my step-dad have been together now for 25 years. My mom isn't gay. She and my other step-dad just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. I'll be thirty next month.
When El and I started dating I was living in Houston and she was up in Jersey (where I grew up). After she quickly shot down the idea of moving to Texas, I quit my job and headed back up north. I spent the next two years looking for work. I worked those two years, but in about 16 different places. I worked in a lawn mower shop, taught religious school, reviewed porn (and got paid for it - that makes it "reviewed" as opposed to merely "watched"), sold casket insurance (for two days), sold mortgages, temped, managed an office, part-timed at MACY'S over Christmas (closest I've ever come to wanting to harm another human being), and delivered newspapers. I joke with El that she married me for my money.
Leading up to our wedding people would ask me if I was nervous about getting married. Maybe everyone gets asked that. Maybe people asked me because my parents are divorced. Maybe people asked because they knew I would have to dance. Regardless, my answer was the same: "No, not really." I said that I had two really great models of marriage, my mom and my dad, it just so happened that it wasn't their marriage to each other I was modeling.
While my parents original marriage was a disaster of Norse Saga proportions, their second marriages rocked. And rolled. And hiccupped. They did. Except that my dad wasn't technically remarried. Did I mention that he's gay?
My mom and step-dad, Steve, just celebrated their 20th anniversary. We had a bar-b-que in the same backyard where they were married, under the same giant oak where the rabbi blessed them.
My step-dad used to be a sports writer for an old newspaper. And despite his misplaced affections for the New York Metropolitans (Go Yanks!), baseball has always been a bond for the two of us. Steve's also brilliant. There's not much about history or politics he doesn't know, and the man can flat out write.
My mom has been a public school teacher for the last 35 years - all in the same school. She did the single-parent-super-mom-while-working thing. Now she does the I-really-want-to-be-a-grandparent thing. Mom pushed my sister and me in school, always asked why I wasn't dating more, and tells me that El is her friend and I better treat her right.
Steve has been a rock for my mom the last ten years as my grandfather declined from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. My mom would drive out to Long Island from Jersey every Sunday to visit my grandparents. Steve was right with mom. When my grandfather died last winter, my mom clung to my step-dad for days.
My dad and my step-dad Lewis have been together for 25 years. They're an interfaith couple, which my sister and I love because we get Hanukah and Christmas. Lewis is a classically trained organist, and plays every Sunday at a Presbyterian Church. If he's not playing on a Sunday, then he's attending. In 25 years I've never known him to miss a Sunday at church.
I've only lived my life with my step-dad in it. He's been a huge influence. I went to the College Lewis went to, which is the college his dad went to. It was in the town they lived in. I take a lot of pride in being a "third generation" at this prestigious institution, and I valued the chance to see my grandparents often while I was at school.
Lewis's father, my grandfather, died about five years ago. Lewis and my dad moved down south from New York City to take care of my 85 year old grandmother. She's got macular degeneration and is completely blind now for about eight years. The three of them bought a house in a new development in town, and Lewis works outside the home (playing organ and doing media planning), while my dad does some marketing consulting from home while taking care of my grandmother. He cooks for her, feeds, her, bathes her, dresses her. He does it because he knows it would be too much for my step-dad to handled.
The two of them have been down south now for about four years. It was tough for Lewis to go back home, to small town America, after being in New York City for 25 years. My dad took to it like a duck to water. He has a 50 person Seder every Passover (in a town with about 7 Jews). Two Christian preachers are usually in attendance with their wives and kids. My dad now has a waiting list for spots.
That, in the broadest of strokes, was my model for marriage as El and I headed toward our own wedding. I had four parents, two marriages to look at, to draw from, to learn by. I saw fights and fun and kissing (ew, mom!) and frustration and joy and despair. There were things I knew for sure I wanted to avoid, and things I embraced.
The day after our wedding EL and I just kept looking at each other, going, "We're married" with stupid looks on our faces. Stupid because we knew something was different, but nothing felt different. We were best friends the day before, we were best friends the day after. I still had morning breath. El still put up with my morning breath.
But some things had changed. El, deciding to take my last name (it moved her up from "S" to "G" in the alphabet, and is much easier to spell), had to go to the Social Security office. And change her drivers license. And her credit cards. And her W-2. And her frequent flyer stuff. And her school registration. And her passport. And her car registration. And all of her other million pieces of documentation and bills and clubs and whatnot. I don't think she'd do it again.
Oh. And I got to go on her health insurance. She's actually got decent stuff. We never use it, so I assume it's decent. What do you want? I'm an American.
We don't really own anything, but if we ever do buy a house, then it'll each be ours wholly and jointly thanks to our marriage. Oh, and we get to share each other's social security benefits in like a gazillion years if the stock market does well or something. Wait. I'm confused. Never mind.
And, um, well, our married life is a lot like our dating life. We've certainly grown as people and as a couple (still can't get El to put the toilet paper on the roll overhand, though), but I think that's more time at work than our mystical classification as "married." We have our stresses and our joys, and we wouldn't want either without sharing them. Just like my dad and step-dad, just like my mom and step-dad.
El and I have a great marriage. It isn't threatened by anything other than my occasional burrito overindulgence. Our marriage certainly isn't threatened by somebody else's marriage. It's only been strengthened by them.