From Straight Marriage to Gay Marriage

“…I want you to know that I support your rights to marry who you want.”

I received a text from my ex-wife a few days ago at the beginning of the Supreme Court hearings on DOMA – there was more to the original text she sent me, but that was the main point. The text she sent before that one asked if I would pick up crickets for our boys’ gecko, Astro.

I met my ex-wife in college. We started dating about halfway through my freshman year, her sophomore year. She was the first person I had ever dated. I went to an all boys high school, so dating a classmate was not something I had ever considered. My high school experience is something that I have written about occasionally, but it was a pretty devastating experience and one that I think really shaped the years of my life after high school, through marriage and ultimately, my coming out. Almost every day of the four years of high school, I was picked on/bullied/whatever you want to call it for being gay – or rather, being perceived as gay. I didn’t admit it to myself for years, so kudos on them for recognizing it before I was ready to. While dating my future ex-wife, I made the admission to her that I was bisexual. I believed with everything in my being that I was in fact bi. I loved her and wanted to be with her. We got married after we both finished grad school and a little over a year after that, we had our first son. Sixteen short months later, we had our second son. It was about a year after his birth that I really began to question my bisexuality. I spent a year thinking about it, questioning it and eventually deciding that I wasn’t bisexual – I was just gay.

Six years later, my ex-wife texted me letting me know that she supports my right to get married to another man if I so choose. I don’t know if I will get married again. I spent years thinking that I would never, ever do it again. Things change, I changed. I looked at pictures of teenagers at the Nation For Marriage rally who wrote on a pad of paper why they were supporting traditional marriage and wonder if they’ll change as they age, too. I like to think that most of them will look back at that and be embarrassed at what they wrote.

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Most of the arguments against gay marriage fall back on religion, procreation and certain people’s disapproval of homosexuality.

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I often wonder what these teenagers thought about gay marriage when they were five years younger – what about in 5 years? What will the landscape of gay marriage be like in the United States?

We’ll have a new president in 5 years – what position will he or she take on gay marriage? Gay marriage isn’t going anywhere. People’s thoughts and views on gay marriage continue to change, especially when more and more people know or have a gay family member.

As my own personal landscape changed dramatically in the last 6 years, so has the world we live in. In those six years, I’ve gone from a straight marriage to the possibility of a gay marriage with the exact same benefits of a straight marriage. I live in Massachusetts, so technically I could have married a same sex partner in 2004, but I am thinking of the big picture and having a potential marriage recognized by every state in the country I live in. I believe it will happen as does my ex-wife and I think that says something.

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