This fall, early October, my boyfriend and I intend to take a trip to someplace north of here. Somewhere private, where we can rent a little cabin in the woods for a few days, and be by ourselves. On one of those days, we intend to hike out into the middle of nowhere, to find a spot we both consider beautiful. There, we will exchange vows, and rings.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot. We decided we wanted to marry on the second anniversary of our very first date. We’ll have been living together for a year and a half by then.
He makes me happier than I’ve ever been, and I’m a happy kind of guy. He’s the man I’ve looked for all my life. I want so badly to make promises to him, to tell him all the things I want to do with him to make him happy for as long as we both live. I always thought that committing myself to someone would be frightening; I never thought that I would crave that commitment with the ferocity that I do. I need him in my life, and I’ll do whatever it takes to make certain that he’s as happy as I can possibly make him. I think I’m doing pretty well so far.
The wedding, of course, is causing some stress. My boyfriend is from a very large family, and he’s not out to everybody, just his folks. It’s probably common knowledge, but he’s not comfortable coming out to everybody by inviting them to his wedding to another man. I agree with him; there are a lot of good ways to alienate people during the coming-out process, and dropping it bombshell-style is way up there on the list. Me, on the other hand, I come from the typical anemic WASP single-parent non-extended family, and I’m out to everybody. But we’re scattered all over the country, logistics is a problem, and it wouldn’t feel fair to have a wedding for my family members alone.
I regret that my mom won’t be able to see us get married; she’s so happy that I’ve found my boyfriend, and they really like each other. But I think she understands. She went with us to find the rings that we’re going to exchange (some nice handcrafted carved rings from an artist born up where my boyfriend’s from) and she’s volunteered to give us her wedding ring so we can use the gold from it in our own. It’s an incredibly touching gesture.
There are, of course, a lot of obstacles to making this union work. The fact remains, despite all of them, we want to make these promises to each other. We want to pledge ourselves to go through life together. We will do so without legal or religious endorsement, without our family and friends looking on, without ceremony or ritual or rite. We’ll do it because we want, more than anything, to build a life together.
I wanted to share something important to me for my 2000th post. This community means a lot to me; you’re a constant reminder of the integral decency of humanity, the warmth and humor and compassion that exemplifies the best that our race has to offer. This wedding is still a long way off, but I’m looking forward to it like I’ve never anticipated anything in my life. In my time on these boards, I’ve shared my anger, my sorrow, my pain, my weirdness, my strange sense of humor, my research and my sympathy. Now that I’m this exuberantly happy, I want to share that with you too.
Thanks for being here.