A few weeks ago, I wrote this piece about going to the town clerk's office the very first day that same-sex marriage licenses were being given out in Vermont.
We did the formal ceremony a little under two weeks ago. It was quiet, mellow and really kind of nice.
Before the ceremony everyone told me that marriage changes everything, that no matter how much you think it won't, it changes you.
Maybe so. But if so, I just haven't noticed it.
I know I've only been married for a short while, but honestly, what's most special about this for me is the ordinariness of it: the week before the ceremony, people asked me if I were nervous. I really wasn't. The week after, people asked me how it went. And then everything went back to normal.
What I love about being married isn't the idea of it being special or different. It's the idea of it being just ordinary.
And honestly, I think this is what scares opponents of same-sex marriage more than anything else. They want to call it "special" rights. They want to call it an attack on traditional marriage. But the fact of it is that it's just what it is: two people who made a choice for themselves. In our case, it was two people who made a choice for themselves, had a nice quiet ceremony and had a surprisingly uneventfully pleasant party.
So let me just say this: pretty much everyone I know, even people I know who are really conservative, seem genuinely happy for us.
I think this is where the people who oppose same-sex marriage will, in the long run, fail: not because they're wrong (which they are) but because when ordinary people know same sex couples who are married, they can see exactly what is there: people who care for one another in the quiet, dull, and ordinary ways everyone else does. When groups claim that same-sex marriage will destroy something, it's prevalent on them to prove it. When they make such unrealistically and obviously false claims, all it takes is an act of truth to prove them wrong.
Married life, for me, is still just life.