Marriage was never a given for me. Sure, I was indoctrinated like most to see marriage as one of the end points, one of the major sacraments (if not for religious anymore, at least for society) to pass as signs of success. But I never figured I would get married. I focused on academic affairs instead of romantic ones, and I never expected to have even a regular partner until I'd finished my PhD and had a decent job. I always said I didn't have time for a girlfriend; I just wanted to fuck (not that I did much of that) to satisfy my needs, but I was happy with my cats, my computer, my books, my friends and travel. I'm not going to say I was completely satisfied being single. I wanted someone to spend time with, someone special, but I always thought there were more important things.



I'd seen so many friends change and fade away from me when they entered into relationships. (I admit I'm not immune from this characteristic.) I never wanted to be like that because I don't believe that one person can or should be everything to you. (Part of this has to do with monogamy, but that's for another day.) I proudly claimed the label quirkyalone, a term that is defined as

Quirkyalones are people who enjoy being single (but are not opposed to being in a relationship) and prefer being single to dating for the sake of being in a relationship.

Quirkyalone is not anti-love. It is pro-love. It is not anti-dating. It is anti-compulsory dating. We tend to be romantics. We prefer to be single rather than settle. In fact, the core of quirkyalone is the inability to settle. We spend a signficant chunk of our lives single because we hold relationships to a high standard.

Are quirkyalones loners? Not necessarily. Quirkyalones often value friendship very highly. We're often very social people. But we do value occasional solitude. Quirkyalones are often creative and need time alone to allow thoughts to fully form.

The definition still fits. I love that coupledom is included in the concept as well, under the term quirkytogether. You can still be yourself when you're in a relationship! It seems that people so rarely know this. And it is possible to have a completely fulfilling life as a singleton. I was in high school when I started thinking I might never marry. Part of this was because I was fighting hard to stay in the closet, and I associated marriage with patriarchy and men, neither of which I wanted anything to do with. But I had several excellent role models of women who were spinsters (I mean this in the best possible sense) and they fucking rocked. I wanted to be just like them. And I decided in junior high that I wanted to adopt a baby (more on birthing later, too) regardless of whether or not I was in a relationship. I had plenty of friends raised by single women and it didn't seem bad. I always knew I wanted children, but I didn't see this as having anything to do with a relationship.

Trouble is, I'm a hopeless romantic. And, as Melissa Ferrick puts it, It's also true what you've heard about me; I fall in love every time. I've had some scrapes with unrequited love, and at this time last year, having been celibate for over two years, I was sure at last that I would be single forever, that a romantic relationship was not something I was meant for.

And then I met her. I was totally fucking blindsided by Luckdragon. Every minute we spent together made me quickly revising my thinking. After four days, I fell hard in love with her, real love, in a way I'd never felt before, a way that made me realize I had never been in love before. Who was this person I was becoming? And she felt the same way about me. In fact, she had, literally, ordered me. After her last, awful break up, she put out a request to the universe, writing down a list of what she wanted in a partner. And I am everything on that list. I always thought about relationships from my point of view, never from the other person's perspective. We think about what we want, not what we have to offer.

We have our differences, of course, but we are perfect for each other. We are compatible in a way I never thought possible, and I know it sounds saccharine, but it's true. I'm optimistic, but I'm not stupid. I know things won't always be perfect. I know we'll have our problems. (The major one for the first year of our relationship is that we live 1000 miles apart.) I'm sure there are things about this that I am naive about. But I'd like to think that my years as a singleton have prepared me for married life; I knew what I didn't want to become and what I didn't want my relationship to be. It doesn't really matter that we're getting married (though I'm having a ball planning the party!). We've made the decision to be permanent, cohabiting partners, whether the government or my grandmother accepts it or not.

And even though I never thought I would get married, I didn't count on Luckdragon; I didn't want to partake in the institution of marriage in the abstract, but specifically? Yes, I do want to marry Luck. I wouldn't want to marry someone else, just her, my sexy, dreadlocked, goalie chef who always thinks of others before herself, who knows her poet-partner so well that she proposes in the poetry section of a used bookstore with a ring made from falling stars. And she will refuse to assimilate and have a normal life or a normal marriage, and abnormality is the only kind I can imagine.

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Despite many years of scorning my straight friends, I, too, have now become a Bridezilla—at least one in training. I spend hours browsing wedding websites and buying bridal magazines, comparing different veil lengths and debating the merits of one friend over the other for maid of honor. Because now I, the eschewer of weddings, am now planning my own. I have met my soul-mate and am happier than I ever imagined I could be. I feel like writing a formal apology—on vellum embossed paper, no less—apologizing to all my friends at whom I scoffed during their nuptials. I get it now, how easily it is to be sucked into the Wedding Machine, how fierce is the desire to succumb to the industry’s insistence that this day be The Most Perfect Day of Your Life in order to accurately celebrate and display your Real True Love to the world.

So when I told my mother that my girlfriend and I were planning to get married, I was upset that she didn’t congratulate me. The first thing she said was, “Your brother has to get married first!”



The difference in the way my family treats and talks about my brother and me has never appeared so clearly as it does when it comes to the issue of marriage. Though I, too, met my beloved and knew right away we were meant to be—just like my brother and FSIL, just like my parents, even my grandparents—it is my brother and FSIL who are the Couple of the year. Though both my brother and I will wed in the next year (brother this July, me next June), it is his wedding everyone talks about. When a high school friend of mine saw my mom in the grocery store, she said, “Hey, I hear that Loaf is engaged!” “Yes. Well. Her brother is getting married first, and that’s all I can deal with right now.”

We say that because the wedding is two years away, we are taking our time planning. It’s true that we aren’t calling caterers and booking venues, but we set a tentative date, and we talk about it every now and then. Okay. We talk about our wedding all the time. It’s better than talking about how much we hate living fifteen hours away from each other or how crazy our families are or how shitty it is that we have to go to a foreign country to wed. Destination weddings are growing in popularity, but it still feels odd to determine our guest list based on who has a passport or not. Sure, we’re just crossing the bridge from Detroit to Winsdor, Ontario, but by 2008, you’ll need a passport to reenter the U.S. It’s hard enough getting our extended families to accept that we’re not marrying men, but to ask Grams to get a passport? My mother insists it’s too much. Because our union isn’t legal, Mom focuses on the “real” wedding my brother will have. I worry that my parents won’t acknowledge my ceremony the way they celebrate my brother’s. After all, they’re right. Even though I’m marrying in Canada where equal marriage is a reality, that marriage license won’t be worth shit once I cross the border. In some sense, the wedding won’t be real.

Recently a friend of mine overheard me talking on the phone to Luckdragon about our wedding plans. When I got off the phone, she asked for details. I mentioned our plans to wed in Canada, since equal marriage rights aren’t available in the States. “Who cares if it’s legal or not?” she shrugged. “What does that really matter?”

Only a straight person could say such a thing, someone who has never had to question the rights they feel entitled to, the benefits of heterosexuality they take for granted. The truth is there are 1,138 federal benefits for which heterosexual married couples are eligible, from hospital visitation rights and the right to make medical decisions for your partner to inheritance benefits and the right to family leave. Many of these privileges cannot simply be secured by having a lawyer draw up some paperwork; there is no legal document that would allow me to take a leave from work to provide care for Luckdragon if she became seriously ill, and that’s just one of the many things from which we are excluded.

A legal ceremony is not just a formality. There are very real consequences of a marriage that is not recognized. This is why I hate the term “commitment ceremony,” even though that’s exactly what a “real” wedding is. It’s two people making a commitment to one another. But the connotations of a “commitment ceremony” are that it is “not a marriage.” In other words, something less than a real wedding.

Marriage became a sacrament in the Catholic church in 1215 and all that made a marriage a valid marriage—according to official decree—was a couple’s private vows, even if those vows were said in absolute secrecy, with no witnesses. I love this. Because isn’t that what a wedding really should be? A promise you make to your partner that depends not on floral arrangements or a string quartet, but the commitment you’re vowing? So why do I need my wedding to be a public affair? Especially since it’s not legal, couldn’t Luckdragon and I exchange vows one night in bed and tell the world we’re married from that day forth? It will be just as non-legal as that Canadian marriage license.

True, some couples—straight and gay alike—eschew marriage and all of its connotations for something of their own design. We will make our wedding our own, but I want to say to my family, to the world, to each other, that I love my wife just as much, in no way is it different from what they understand as "real" and "valid." Those opponents of marriage say they don’t want to “act like straight people” and “pretend they’re just the same.” Gay relationships, critics insist, are fundamentally different from straight relationships, and, therefore, the idea of marriage is not applicable. Conservative opponents of equal marriage say that if gays are allowed to marry, it will fundamentally alter—even destroy—the institution as a whole.

But it is not just gay people who have queered marriage and coupling. Plenty of straight people live in kinky, polyamorous situations, raise children out of wedlock and live together before they’re married. As famed sex advice columnist Dan Savage, author of the weekly “Savage Love,” which appears in independent papers throughout the country, has said, “The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn’t that gay people are trying to redefine marriage in some new, scary way, but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples.”

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Since I graduated from high school and left the Midwest, I dread checking my mailbox. It seems it is always stuffed with ivory vellum letterpress invitations, powder blue engraved save-the-date cards, reception notes done up with hand calligraphy, carefully drawn maps, RSVP slips on cardstock. Everyone has gotten married and I have shelled out hundreds of dollars on gifts and travel expenses to help celebrate my friends’ special days, all the while knowing that (though this isn’t the point, though it is against my good-little-Midwestern-girl nature to think this) none of it would come back my way. Since gay marriage isn’t legal, I never planned to wed, which meant no fancy stationery, no gift registry, no hordes of friends both pleased and envious to cheer me on.



I have been critical of weddings for the last ten years. While I’m supportive of my friends’ marriages, and I can’t seem to help but cry at their ceremonies, I speak out against weddings often. Growing up, it seemed I was always a flower girl. My mother’s four younger brothers were marrying throughout my childhood. By the time I reached adolescence, half those marriages and my faith in the institution had ended. Though I was raised by parents who married young—high school sweethearts for whom divorce never entered the discussion—I have always been suspicious of the idea of walking down an aisle wearing a veil, my father handing me over to another man I’d vow to obey, another man who would run my life, tell me not to stay out late or forbid me to cut my hair. Of course part of the reason I resisted this idea, even in my youth, was because of my latent homosexuality. Once I was in college, out and proud, marriage, like monogamy, seemed one more of those things that just didn’t fit into what I expected to be my “gay lifestyle.”

It is not uncommon to view promiscuity as a virtue when you’re young, but even when I was trying desperately to be a wild lesbian bachelor, I knew that I was really just not wired that way. Still, I maintained a firm grip on that ideal, abhorring marriage, promising myself I’d never change my name and allow my identity to be subsumed into another’s. I was young, I was free, I had my own plans and I didn’t want some other person to show up and get in my way. But there was, of course, another reason marriage wasn’t attractive to me; unless I live in Massachusetts (which requires proof of residency to marry), it’s not legal for me to wed. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for anyone to feel wary of a wedding, but how could I help but be suspicious of something that was denied me? I don’t care if I can’t have it; I don’t want it anyway!

Even the unspoken blessings some couples receive implicitly makes me cringe. The way some types of couples are lauded and others ignored. I remember one moment this summer, sitting around in the living room with my parents, my brother and his fiancée. Dad was playing DJ, tracking his history with my mother through songs. He played songs from their wedding—“Evergreen” and “Candle On the Water”—then Brother started popping in CDs.

“This is the song I played on our second date, six years ago,” he said softly.
“That was when he told me he was falling in love with me!” FSIL finished the sentence. We all sat quietly listening to Mazzy Star croon “Fade Into You” as each couple snuggled on the couch. Two weeks ago, I had cried my eyes out in a tent in the woods of Michigan, soft folk music strumming on a stage a hundred yards away as I told my new girlfriend Luckdragon I was falling in love with her after knowing her for a week.
“Can I play a song next?” I asked.
“Oh, Valerie, we don’t want to hear your lesbian music,” my mother laughed, standing up to refill the pitcher of lemonade as Colin popped another CD into the stereo.

Though I have recently fallen head over heels in love, I do reject the notion that still seems prevalent that marriage is an accomplishment to tick off. If I am to be successful, it will be on my own merits, not because I managed to snag a spouse. It is difficult for me to maintain that conviction, however, as I have watched my friends wed, and each birthday since I turned 20, my grandmother has called me up and reminded me that every woman in my family either marries by the time they’re 20, or remains a spinster forever.

It is for this reason that I have found myself obsessed with and repelled by the spectacle of my friends’ weddings. When my best friend (and Maid of Honor) got married two years ago, I never thought she would succumb. She had been just as critical as me about weddings, but when I showed up the day before the ceremony to don the coral bridesmaid dress and stand by her side as she married a man I adored and knew to be perfect for her, I discovered another demon. Now, I imagine it is hard to plan a wedding in six weeks, with a mother-in-law on her deathbed, ordering you around and your future husband saying, “Please, honey, just this once, it’s her dying wish!” Well, the woman had so many dying wishes it’s a wonder my friend didn’t pull the plug, move the date and do everything her own way. All this is to say that I understood what had driven her to this frazzled, maniacal state; she had extenuating circumstances. And in the end, her ceremony was disgustingly perfect. As she and her new husband left the church, now lawfully wed, the sun was setting and the rosy-peach clouds looked exactly like the puffs of tulle the bridesmaids were wearing.

Six months later, as she showed me her wedding photos, I couldn’t help but feel jealous. Even though I hated the idea of getting married, even though I was so happy for my friend, I felt left out. This was more than just “always a bridesmaid…”—I’d only been a bridesmaid once. Even my reticence toward the institution was beside the point; it just wasn’t fair. I felt like I was looking at pictures of all the fun my friends had at the club I wasn’t allowed to join.


To be continued...

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The thing that's important to know is that I hate dresses. I know some lesbians who love dresses, and some who hate them even more than I do. But I generally consider myself to be closer to the butch end of the spectrum. So when it came to picking out our wedding outfits, I wasn't sure which direction to go. Some lesbians look good in pantsuits. I never have. So I didn’t consider wearing a suit for my wedding, even though I do tend to hate dresses. I haven’t worn a dress since being a bridesmaid in my MOH's (that's maid of honor, for those of you not familiar with wedding acronyms) wedding almost two years ago. But I view occasions like graduations and weddings as opportunities for a costume. Dresses are so far from my normal wardrobe (sloppy jeans and t-shirts or, if I’m dressing up, a Polo) that it does feel like costuming. Since a wedding is such a production, an honest, earnest one, but a production nonetheless (something heightened by the fact that Luck was a theater major and I grew up in my parents’ community theater and we have set ourselves the task of memorizing our vows), it only makes sense to dress the part.



I remember when my wedding dress arrived in the mail. I discovered the simple slip dress online at David's Bridal. Even though I kind of hate that store, my budget just doesn't allow for fancy bridal shops, and I can’t justify spending obscene cash on a dress that I’ll wear once. But that’s not to say I didn’t care about what I’d be wearing. For some people, the dress is one of the most important parts, and I think that's fine. For me, I just wanted something pretty; I wanted something simple, not too feminine, not puffy, no skirts full of tulle or crinoline. It was only available online, so I couldn’t try it on, but there was a special feature. You could press a button: “see this dress in motion” and the model would come to life, swaying from side to side and then twirling, the ivory fabric flowing like soft water around her legs. This was The Dress.

I’d heard other women talk about this feeling—they compare it to the moment when they knew their partner was The One. Often it comes when trying on dresses in the store, stepping onto the pedestal surrounded by mirrors, opening your eyes and looking around. Magazines call it the, “Oh, Mom” moment. Tears fall, your mother and maid of honor flock to your side and coo. “Oh, this is it! This is The One!” The dress you’ll be married in, the dress you will wear on the most important day of your life, the dress you’ll be wearing when the other One sees you for the first time as his wife. When I watched the dress move, I couldn’t help but imagine it swirling around my toes, or how good I would look in the gown, and how Luck’s eyes would fill with tears as she saw me walking toward her.

But that aisle walk is something else we wanted to reconsider. I don't want my father to walk me down the aisle like I'm chattel he's giving away. And deciding who walks down the aisle first made us certain that we didn't want to set up some bride/groom paradigm--even though people are constantly asking us who is "the guy" and who's "the girl." I don't try to explain lesbian gender dynamics, because it's not that simple. Both of us are more butch than femme, though I'm more likely to wear a girly shirt, and Luckdragon is the ice hockey goalie and I'm the poet. But one thing we knew was that we wanted to approach this marriage together.

So these two soft butch girls will be walking down the aisle together, in dresses.

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You know the story. Girl meets girl. Girls kiss outside each others' tents. Girls spend the next day talking under an oak tree. Girls fall in love, move into a tent together and start planning their Canadian wedding.

( I know, you're thinking "Wait a sec, What's this with tents?")

Well, last year I met my beloved, "Luckdragon" at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It was the safest way to U-Haul. She slept in my tent almost every night, and we got a taste of what it would be like to be together all the time, in the heat and sweat and 'skeeters of a Michigan summer. We held hands as Elvira Kurt regaled us with her humor, we kissed and fondled while Melissa Ferrick belted out "Drive." We cooed as we got our picture taken with Bitch. I worked one night in Sprouts, the toddler "daycare" and Luckdragon said she knew when she saw me changing a diaper that she wanted to have my babies.



Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic, but we did fall in love at Fest. Unfortunately, Luckdragon lives in Detroit and I am a grad student in Tallahassee. Throughout the week, fellow lesbians cooed over how cute we were, and asked, "So, what happens after Fest?" We'd grimace and answer in unison: "We haven't talked about that yet."

We didn't know what would happen after Fest, but we did realize that if we were going to make a long-distance relationship work, we had to want the same things. The relationship had to be going somewhere.

Yes, it's true. I bought my wedding dress two months after meeting her.

I like to think, though, that we didn't rush into things. Sure we talked about marriage during the first week, but it's been 8 months now, and though the wedding plans are well under way (June 20, 2009!), we still live six states apart. Luck is moving down here in August, and that will be a year together. It will be almost two before we tie the knot. So we stick it out in Florida while I finish my thesis, and then comes the fun part. Applying to PhD programs and moving in May before the June wedding. There aren't too many programs for Creative Writing, and we're pretty particular about where we live.

Did you know that only eight states in the US officially allow second-parent adoption?

You see, we want to have kids in the next four years (Luck is training to be an LD nurse (Labor & Delivery, not Lesbian Drama--I know what you're thinking!) and she'll be 30 by the wedding, and would like to give birth before she's 35.

So amid picking out chair covers and ring pillows, we're also shopping for sperm and investigating the intricacies of adoption codes and current legislation.

Follow along as we navigate my brother's wedding (to which Luck is invited as my "special friend"), the fact that my mother watches The L Word to "see what you lesbians are up to," unfriendly wedding vendors, the Florida marriage amendment on the ballot this November and how hard is it to publish a dyke-themed poem, anyway?

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