Some little girls grow up imagining their wedding day with great excitement and anticipation.  Me, not so much.  I just never “got” what the big deal was, and anything having to do with me wearing a dress and being in a spotlight was the last thing I wanted to imagine for my future!  And, wearing a tux instead of a dress didn’t help much either.  Such is the life of a tomboy and nascent lesbian growing up in the 1970s.

Lisa and I have been together for over 17 years.  We met at Purdue University, where we were both professors, and we both came into the relationship cautiously.  Neither of us was interested in making West Lafayette, Indiana our permanent home, and so we weren’t planning too far ahead.  I think we both just wanted companionship and connection.  The last thing we did in those early days was talk about commitment or a long-term future.

The big “commitment” came when we moved to Arizona together, where we both secured jobs as professors at Arizona State University.  We bought a house together, and that, more than anything else was our formal or legal assertion of commitment to our relationship.  The idea of marriage had been circulating in the public for quite a while even then, but given my childhood feelings about it, it was never something I wanted even though I sensed that Lisa did.

Then we came to a point where the momentum for the Federal recognition of gay marriage was gaining tremendous momentum.  I finally asked Lisa to marry me.  It wasn’t anything like a romantic, down-on-my-knee event.  In fact we were driving in the car–very unromantic.  But there was something very special about that moment because we had been talking about it, and there came that point when I uttered those words, “Lisa, will you marry me?” in a way that was absolutely real.  And it was very special because at that moment Lisa knew that I meant it, that it conveyed something of my love for her that couldn’t be expressed in any other way.

So what’s the point of my going on and on sharing my personal life in this blog?  The point is that I think that what the Federal recognition of same-sex marriage gives us is a chance for all of us to rethink what marriage is as we live it with our intimate partners.  Too many marriages are less than happy or successful.  Too many marriages are places of distress, violence, and abuse.  We need to all re-think marriage, not as a matter of the sex of the partners, but more as a matter of what our particular “marriage” is, as we live within it through the everyday mundane aspects of life.  We need to think about the reality of what happens and what we experience in our “marriage” relationships.  Because, the word “married” ultimately means nothing outside of the relationship to which it is applied.

Thus I’ve come to re-imagine marriage.  It’s no longer for me what I saw as a little girl tomboy and wanted nothing to do with.  It has taken me a long time to re-imagine marriage in a way that befits how I feel about Lisa and having her in my life.  And that I’ve been able to do this is largely because our dear friends, Lewis and Jane Gordon, offered to hold a marriage ceremony for us in conjunction with the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting at UCONN in 2016.  Lewis himself offered to marry us, and upon his doing so I was immediately struck by the gift that we give to each other through our relationships–that Lewis and Jane gave to us, that Lisa and I could give to each other, that we could share with a community gathering with a common sense of care and recognition.  The reverberations of those gifts move in every direction — from couple to community, community to couple, person to person within and outside the couple, and person to community and back.

It says a lot about a scholarly community that wants to celebrate the lives of its members in such a way.  Jane and Lewis are, of course, two key leaders of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and it is their deep and abiding sense of humanity and human recognition that literally births relationships capable of sustaining the best in all of us.  Lisa and I together do that as well, but we do it better with others doing the same.

What if we re-imagined “marriage” like this?  Far from being the end of anything, it could, instead, cultivate more humane communities where the valuing of each other is what sustains the connections that bind us.

What do you think?