It’s amazing how fast the weeks have been passing since I started my new job. Every other Monday night I go to a trivia contest with friends; Tuesday night is chorus rehearsal; then it’s Humpday, then Thursday and then it’s the weekend – which zooms by – and then it’s Monday again.
And I have a job that I actually kinda like.
Someday I’ll wake up and suddenly be 65, won’t I. Scary.
Congratulations to all the gay couples in New Jersey who are finally able to get married today!
(And wow – my family’s rabbi helped officiate the first ceremony just after midnight.)
What’s that, you say? It’s not actually marriage, but just a civil union, grumble grumble spineless New Jersey legislators grumble grumble?
Well actually, it is marriage – state marriage, not federal marriage, but marriage nonetheless – no matter what the statutes and the licenses say. Gay couples in New Jersey, as of today, are entitled to all the rights and responsibilities that straight couples can have. All the exact same ones. You can take your spouse’s name, you can adopt your spouse’s biological children, your children are “legitimate,” you can’t be forced to testify against your spouse in court, you can leave your property to your spouse, you have automatic hospital visitation rights, and so on. It’s marriage.
While the technical term is “civil union,” gay couples who are civil-unioned need to begin referring to themselves as married – which they are legally allowed to do. (The New Jersey Supreme Court stated in its opinion last fall that after the new law goes into effect, “same-sex couples will be free to call their relationships by the name they choose” no matter what name the legislators give to the unions.) Only by referring to themselves as married – only by referring to their relationships as marriages – will gay couples help their fellow New Jerseyans realize that civil unions and marriages must be treated the same way legally. And it will help those relationships become more accepted socially as well.
I’m tired of hearing people complain that all they can get is this civil union thing and it’s not really marriage. If you keep up that attitude, other people are going to start believing it. So stop it.
Yes, the legislature stopped short of using the word marriage. So what? You’re married. Make sure everyone knows what that means.
Congratulations!
I went to the wedding of a college friend over the weekend. Most of my core group of friends from college was there.
And everyone has kids.
Okay, not everyone. I don’t have kids. My lesbian friend and her partner don’t have kids. The couple that just got married doesn’t have kids.
But one of my friends and his wife brought their 6-month-old, and another friend and his wife also have an infant, and another friend and his wife have an 18-month-old and a newborn. And the two couples who weren’t there also have kids.
Another classmate has a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old.
After the reception, I anticipated a long night of drinking and card-playing in someone’s hotel room, because that’s what we’ve done in the past when we’ve all gotten together. But nobody brought cards. By 11:30, most of our group had gone to bed. It was left to four of us (including the groom) to play pool in the hotel bar, drinking a couple of beers, until the bar closed at approximately 12:45 in the morning. By 1 a.m. I was back in my extraordinarily comfy hotel bed.
The next morning at brunch we all sat around and I listened to everyone talk about kids. Should babies watch television? How much attention should you give kids? Little kids in restaurants all play electronic games today! Even the lesbians, who live near Park Slope, were able to chime in with a story about liberal Park Slope parents bringing their babies to bars and how sometimes people can’t into the bars because there are too many strollers in the way.
Who are all these people and what the hell have they done with my friends?
Sigh. Suddenly everyone’s in their early 30s and married with growing families. I look back on all the years I’ve known these people. There was college, when we all lived in the same dorm and saw each other every day and worried about mid-terms and extracurricular activities. There were the chaotic years after college, when we (well, they, not me) were young and making money and living in the big city — we’d all get together in New York or D.C. every year or two and spend lots of money on long nights of drinking at noisy bars, and my friend Doug (R.I.P.) would try to pick up girls.
And now it’s all about babies.
Whenever we all get together I feel so different. I feel like they’ve been travelling through the conventional stages of adult life while I suffer from retarded development. As the years pass it seems that my life diverges from theirs more and more. I live in a different world than they do. I’m a gay man in New York City, and although I have a partner like them, my life is not the same as theirs and it never will be. Straight people in their early 30s are not the same as gay people in their early 30s. I wonder if we’ll grow even more different as the years pass.
This isn’t good or bad and I don’t have any judgments to make about it. All I mean to say is that it’s, well, profound.
We’re three-dimensional creatures, we human beings, but sometimes it’s that fourth dimension, the one we can’t see – time – that causes the most wonderment.