Why are we doing this?

Each of us has been raised in a predominantly heterosexual community, and the expectations to meet someone or have our parents introduce us to someone, the expectations to get married and have children are all around us. Some of us probably imagined meeting the partner of our dreams and living happily ever after, some of us probably couldn't imagine such a thing and resisted the 'marriage' push, and some of us may never have thought much about it and felt perfectly comfortable letting nature takes its course.

There's a lot of politics, social customs, legal benefits and obligations around marriage. Marriage has always been about exchange of property, procreation (propagating one’s cultural, genetic, and racial group), control of wealth and status, and defining the role of women as subservient to men. Only secondarily, if at all, has marriage been about companionship, love, and mutual fulfillment. In the last 30 years in the United States and some other societies, marriage seems to have transformed into something else. More than ever before, the institution of marriage has come under question. We've seen the legal acceptance and growing community acceptance of interracial couples, inter-religious couples, widows remarrying.

With gays and lesbians wanting the right to marry, there has been a huge political push to define marriage as only valid between one man and one woman.¹ Some countries like Holland, Denmark, and New Zealand have provided for gay and lesbian marriages. The state of Vermont has passed a civil union law that provides same-sex couples the same legal benefits and obligations provided to straight married couples. But Washington State doesn't provide any of these. In other words, our marriage will simply not be legally recognized in this state, even though our own money goes to subsidize the health care and benefits, insurance benefits, retirement benefits, Social Security payment benefits, and all other special rights and advantages given to heterosexual married couples.

There’s a lot of baggage, too, that goes with marriage as defined for the last century in the United States. There’s the notion that the spouses are merely two halves of a whole rather than two whole people coming together. There’s the fact that we live in a couple-centric society where we value couples more than individuals, try to encourage singles to become couples (regardless of their own desires), and create social spaces where single people are unwelcome. There’s the resistance to each spouse’s individual volition. And there’s the notion that there are Rules and that all married couples must follow these Rules or be headed for divorce (like, for example, the Rule that it is automatically a problem if one spouse is attracted to someone else).

So: why are we doing this? Why would we want to be associated with this institution? Where do we see ourselves in all of this? We've been thinking long and hard about this, too.

We're at a stage of our relationship where we know we plan to be with each other for the rest of our lives. We're committed to helping each other grow, helping us grow as a couple, and helping our community grow. We know we want to raise a family together. We know we want to challenge ourselves and the world together. We don't have any guarantees that it's all going to work, but we're fairly confident in our relationship and our commitment to each other to work through the hard times. In the most just, respectful world, this would be what marriage meant. And by this definition, it makes perfect sense that we should get married.

Maybe it's easier for us, because there is no expectation to get married. Maybe that is a source of the desire to get married, to not allow some silly, outdated laws to keep us from making our declarations and gathering support from our families, friends, and community. Maybe if we were straight, we wouldn't even want to get married, because the politics and state sanctioning of marriage feel invasive (not to mention patriarchal and heterosexist). But we're not straight. And having the community support in our commitment feels like both a precious gift and a necessity in the absence of the formalities and legalities. One friend said when her relationship came to the edge of a breaking point, it was the public commitment they made to each other in front of parents, families, friends and community that made them push harder to make it through to the other side.

So in the end, it just came down to us feeling right about doing all of this, good about sharing with you this time in our lives.

• To make a public declaration of our love and life-long commitment to each other.
• To celebrate with our family, friends, and community our commitment to each other
• To be each other's confidant, advocate, friend, lover, teacher, and to keep each other honest
• To help each other grow into our full potential
• To help each other make positive changes in the world
• To give each other strength, courage, trust, faith and hope
• To ask our family, friends, and community to be our guardians and advocates - to share in our joys and to be our guides in times of difficulty.

For anyone who's planned a ceremony, you know how toiling it can be to find a place of agreement. How much of this and do we really need to include that? (Luckily, Vega was very accommodating and didn't offer up too much resistance. Luckily, Mala's expectations were too high to ever become actualized!) As you can imagine, it was a little difficult creating a ceremony that was meaningful to both of us, one of us an atheist, the other an agnostic. The party and celebration elements are more of Vega's contribution, the religious and ceremonial elements, more Mala's contribution.

The performances are special and meaningful. Each adds its own blessing to our ceremony. The Seven Step (saptapadi) wedding ritual is a core element of all Hindu weddings, so we felt it was important to incorporate it in some way into our ceremony as our lives have been so influenced by Hinduism practiced or not practiced by our parents. Mala especially felt that the ceremony would be missing its sense of validation without the Hindu element to it. We're even trying to get a priest to perform the ceremony, but the outlook is getting dimmer and dimmer, and we may create our own variation of the ritual. What's new?

Ultimately, the ceremony will be one that we have created, one that will be meaningful to us, and one that will represent a moment, a feeling, a time, an event that we want to share with our family, friends, and community.

Nothing will change legally as a result of the ceremony. No legal benefits, no social obligations fulfilled (according to the duties prescribed to us by the more conservative people of our familial ancestry and heritage), no state or church sanction. What we do have is knowledge that our family, friends and community will publicly recognize our commitment to each other, and we hope to honor and fulfill that commitment through our lifetime. You will be our witnesses. You will be the ones to offer testimony to how important this shared event is. You will be our anchors as we sail our ship out to sea.

¹Some say it's because marriage is about procreation? But does this mean couples who have infertility issues or who are beyond the childbearing years should not be allowed to marry? Some say it's because marriage is a sacred institution? How does marriage become any less sacred because two mutually consenting adults love each other and want to publicly celebrate and legally recognize their lifelong commitment to each other?