Me and You in 2013

"One of the things I think that same-sex marriage has to teach straight people is about the possibility of a totally equal and mutual relationship. Handing the bride over to the groom: The vows in the prayer book, up until 1928, were love, honor, and obey for the woman. As much as we've tried to revise our marriage service to make everything equal and mutual, it still has with it some connotations and vestiges of premodern ways of understanding male-female relationships. I think one of the ways in which gay and lesbian couples really can teach something to straight couples is the way in which they hold up the possibility of an absolute equality and mutuality in marriage." - The Very Rev. Gary Hall

I stumbled upon this quote in a Savage Love column (go read it!) and it got me thinking. Before we got engaged I considered waiting to get married until everyone can get married but it struck me as an empty gesture -- something celebrities or people in the public eye do. Seeing that we are neither, it made more sense to me to make our marriage ceremony meaningful by including the following passage from Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (aka the ruling that made marriage equal for all couples in Massachusetts):

"Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family. Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition. It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a "civil right." Without the right to choose to marry one is excluded from the full range of human experience."

After including it in our September 2011 nuptials, the passage has become a popular alternative wedding reading (thankyouverymuch New York Magazine). Coupled with the fact that recent polls show 53% of Americans support same-sex marriage, it's just a matter of time before this arbitrary law becomes as obsolete as anti-miscegenation laws (a law my parents would have violated if they had been married 14 years earlier). Since the dawn of time, people in love have defined what "me and you" means. I just hope that this year it means equal rights for "me" and "you."