the world is your acorn

That was the subject line of the email I sent my brother last week letting him know that The Little Red Haired Girl and I have decided to have a wedding. In a way I guess that is how I’m letting you know too. The Little Red Haired Girl and I have decided to have a wedding. I feel reluctant to say that we’re getting married, because we’re not. Legally, we can’t do that. We can’t have that word. In reality, we made our commitment to each other long ago, in many small and large steps along the way. I guess I don’t really want to discuss what “marriage” means here, but the majority of voting Americans have made clear in recent years that whatever we are doing is not it. That’s ok with me. “Marriage”, like Christmas, has been cheapened in this country by that same majority.

What we are doing is, to me, a declaration and celebration of Us. Mrs. Superhero explained it best by highlighting how important it is to be public, and slightly uncomfortable in sharing the intimacy of proclaiming your love of and commitment to your partner. It’s selfish, but will hopefully be fun for our friends and family anyway.

The weird thing about it is that we are planning a sort of a “traditional” wedding. A ceremony with someone officiating, vows exchanged, a reception, that sort of thing. Not religious, but traditional. Not the wedding reclaimed by queers or constructed around our carefully thought out views of what a wedding is really about. I’m not yet sure how I feel about that.

At any rate, we are excited, and planning our little hearts out. We have decided to try and make it happen in the Boston area sometime in the first half of next September. There are a lot of people that I haven’t told yet, who would call me within a few days of their deciding to get married. But at the same time I don’t feel like the news is that I’m getting married. It’s more that we’re having a party. It would be weird if I called everyone I knew the minute I decided to have a birthday party and expected it to be exciting news, right? That might be an excuse for something, but I not sure what.