Wedding Day Blues

This post has been mulling in my brain for quite some time now and it had a very different slant to it before I went to the doctors…as I am finding so much of my life was different before that day!

A week prior to seeing Dr. E., my partner and I had spent considerable time discussing weddings and marriage since we were going to attend the wedding of two of his co-workers, both of whom I’ve met several times before. Truth be told, I was not looking forward to the wedding, even though I like both of the people getting married. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I did not want to face what, for me, have become the inevitable wedding questions…”Why aren’t you married?” “When are you getting married?” “Is there something wrong with you?” “Are you a lesbian?” “When are you going to grow-up?” and so on and so forth.

I hadn’t always been against marriage, in fact, in one of my earlier posts, I wrote about wanting to marry my first childhood love. In college I had a thankfully fleeting feeling that I wanted to marry the guy I was sorta dating, because, as I told my mom, “he is just as miserable as I am”. I’ve even batted the idea around with a few other people I’ve dated since Mr. Misery. The closest I’ve come to following through getting married was with someone I met while living in Ireland, someone I thought was the love of my life. For a long time I fantasized about how getting married would curb his desire to whore, er, travel his way around the world. Fortunately I gave up on that idea!

During my single years since him, I spent a great deal of time thinking about weddings and marriage and what that institution means to me. I attended a lot of weddings as the single woman. I heard the reasons the people around me were getting married and I saw lots of miserable relationships and divorces. I also thought about how I love and what I want from a relationship and from life. And I realized that marriage, as it currently exists in the United States, does not fit my needs or beliefs. I recognized the legalized discrimination inherent in marriage in this country and decided that I was not going to get married until it was something that every adult in this country could do. Naturally when I began to talk about my reasons for not getting married, people assumed I am a lesbian. I let them assume whatever they want.

The truth, in case you care, is that I don’t care one way or the other about the gender of the person I am with, I love or have a crush on. My feelings have been just as strong for men as they have been for women as they have been for people whose gender is not immediately obvious. Trying to discuss this with people in my life all too often has caused even more problems since I can’t easily be labeled.

Once I came to these realizations about myself and decided that I would wait to get married, I made it a point to tell any prospective partner about my views within the first few dates. I also made sure to tell them that I was never going to have children either. This led to a drastic reduction in my dating life!

After my nephews started coming into this world, my views about marriage discrimination only solidified. I wanted them to grow up in a world where they could love and marry, or love and not marry, whomever the hell they pleased. I wanted to show my five nephews that it is important to stand up for what you believe in, even when it isn’t an easy or popular thing to do. And as they grew older and began to ask us if my partner and I were married, I, with both of my sister’s permission, told them that we were waiting until boys could marry boys and girls could marry girls. While at the ripe ages of 7 and 8 I don’t think that they fully comprehend this, I hope it has a positive lifelong impact for them.

My current partner of four years (a new record for me!), happens to be a man…which to me is as insignificant as his eye color. We had zillions of conversations about my views on marriage and kids over endless phone calls, since he lived in Chicago and I lived in Pennsylvania at the time. He was stunned and confused and often disagreed with my viewpoints. While I tried to respect what he was saying, in order to be true to myself, I kept reminding him (and keep on reminding him) that this isn’t about my feelings towards him. This is about my unwillingness to participate in legalized discrimination, a form of discrimination which would directly impact me if he happened to be a woman and not a man.

My partner grew up assuming he would get married and have kids and I did too, until I took boatloads of time to think about these choices for myself. Despite our disagreement on these issues, we began to date and over time, I hope without pressure from me, my partner began to see that he too did not want children and was willing to wait to get married until everyone in this country can.

These decisions did not cause much of a change in his life initially. His friends thought we were weird but it would pass. His family didn’t pry any further when we, separately, told them of our choices. It wasn’t until he was employed at the hospital where he currently works that he began to get a lot of shit and a lot of “You’ll change your mind someday” or “Someday you’ll make an honest woman out of her” crap.

And on some level I was happy that he was finally hearing some of what I have been hearing for so long…that our relationship didn’t matter, wasn’t as important or as meaningful as a marriage. Despite the fact that we are committed to each other in every way, that we have told each other time and again that we want to grow old together through the good times and the bad, that we have joint checking and savings accounts (unlike many married people I know) and that we, at least monthly check in with each other to make sure our relationship is working, moving in a direction we both want it to and that we both want to be here, together; all of this is somehow less meaningful because we choose not to get married! People tend to see our choice based as bizarre or martyr-ish since they assume we are both heterosexual.

Going to weddings always stirs up these issues for me, even though this is the first wedding we will have attended together since we “officially started dating” whatever the hell that means. I also know that we have at least two weddings to attend next year and so I was frequently bringing up all sorts of marriage and wedding related questions for discussion. Almost every chance I had I asked him if he was ok with our decision, how he thought it impacted us, our friends, our family, even his employment. Very little went unanalyzed…it was even getting a little out of control.

Two days before his co-worker's wedding, I did some research on people who were boycotting marriage until it was legal for everyone and I found the National Marriage Boycott which sells equality rings meant to draw attention to the discrimination of marriage (http://marriageboycott.ning.com/). I suggested that we think about signing the pledge and wearing the rings to do even more to call attention to our viewpoints. We decided to think about it for awhile and discuss it again at later point in time (even though the in-your-face part of me wanted to wear those rings to the wedding and have all sorts of controversial conversations, I promised my partner I wouldn’t do that and it turns out no one asked us about getting married any way.).

Less than a week after the wedding and our continual re-evaluation that we are making the right choice for our relationship, our convictions were put to the test. Dr. E. made it explicitly clear that while he was willing to see me for $150 instead what he charges people with insurance, and while he could put some of my treatments on a sliding scale, I was going to need a lot of meds, a lot of physical therapy and possibly other medical interventions which would be beyond my means to pay for, even if I had a job without insurance. Twice during my visit he suggested that if it was ever going to happen, perhaps my partner and I should consider getting married sooner rather than later. I wanted to be appalled at what he was suggesting, but part of me understood where he was coming from and I always had a medical exemption clause in my refusal to get married, I just assumed that this injustice would be corrected before I was 90 and started having health problems.

As I discussed my problems with my partner, I became increasingly scared that marriage was our best option, even though I felt like I would be using him for his benefits. We discussed how our families would react if we went to city hall the following day. We discussed how we both felt about the looming prospect of getting married and he stammered out that if it weren’t for knowing my viewpoints about marriage, he would have proposed a long time ago. I was flattered and I was stunned. Since we never seriously discussed the prospect of marriage I never knew he felt that way.

The conversation was agonizing and raw because we both felt we needed to do the best we could in this situation, even if it meant that I might feel like a hypocrite for caving on my principles just so my medical needs could be met. We discussed the obvious reality that if I were a man or he were a woman, I would be covered under his hospital’s benefits, but no amount of my partner’s letter writing or talking to HR was going to change the hospital’s rules. They claim it’s Pennsylvania state law.

In the days that followed, we agreed not to make a rash decision and get married right away, but instead to explore all our options. I spent hours looking into charity care options. I called every pharmacy in the area to see how much my meds will cost (you’d be amazed at the differences) and compared those costs to what it would be if I had his insurance. I was trying to approach the marriage issue as some sort of cost-benefit analysis and I’ve never had a business class in my life!

I went to the library to find books on my conditions. There are none. I inadvertently passed by the wedding section and with the kind of car crash on the highway mentality, I looked through some of them. I wanted to vomit my brains out as I fled the library. I had nightmares about becoming a bride…about how I am standing in front of endless rows of white, puffy, stupid dresses and I am sobbing my eyes out in a panic because I don’t want any of them. I don’t want this.

Most of all though, I grappled with the strength of my conviction versus feeling like a hypocrite. And I repeatedly thought back to when my partner told me that he would go to city hall and marry me this weekend. My response was to sob in his arms because the doctor told me we can’t have sex until I’m better.

What the hell kind of honeymoon would it be if we couldn’t have sex?