June 15

by Sara Sarasohn

A Marriage Form Will Just Be Icing On Our Cake

I have an elaborate fantasy about the morning of my wedding day.

It will be a cool summer morning, a weekday. At breakfast, our 8-year-old, Jacob, won't complain that food is getting stuck in his brand-new braces. When Ruth, 4, puts on her own shoes, she'll get the right shoe on the right foot. Ellen will unlock the garage and arrange all our bikes in the driveway. We'll ride the five miles down to the Alameda County clerk's office. The kids will get restless waiting out in the hall. Finally, some random person in the clerk's office will be ready for us. She'll be a little bored because she has married so many other gay couples in the past few weeks. She won't care that Ellen and I are wearing shorts and T-shirts. Ellen will write a check. The clerk will fill out some forms.

That's all.

I know plenty of gay couples who are planning more elaborate weddings. They want to have a minister and a big party. They want to wear fancy clothes and invite all their friends. I want the bored Alameda County clerk. To me, the clerk and the forms she files are the most important thing about the wedding Ellen and I will have this summer. The forms are the point of this marriage.

Over the last 10 years or so, as the country has been talking about same-sex marriage, and as my relationship with Ellen has evolved, I've come around to the idea that marriage isn't one institution. Marriage is one word we use to describe a whole suite of institutions. Marriage is about money and property, love and religion, procreation and companionship. For most of history, nobody thought to distinguish between all of those different parts of marriage, because a wedding was the moment when a couple came together in all those ways. The day the priest blessed a couple, they became a single legal entity. That day, they moved into a new house together and had sex for the first time. The myriad distinct ways two people can put their lives together were rolled up in a single event.

In the past several decades, that has changed, for both straight and gay people. Couples routinely live together and have sex before marriage. Babies are born to unmarried women, mostly without scandal. Couples might buy a house together but keep separate bank accounts. A wedding, gay or straight, is not necessarily a moment of great transition so much as it is a simple marker of a years-long process.

I can't pretend to speak for the people who are against gay marriage, but I think this is part of what they mean when they say that gay marriage will unravel the whole institution. Our national conversation about gay marriage has already shown how the different elements of marriage -- legal, religious, romantic, economic, civil, procreative -- have become independent. Any couple can decide to be romantic and economic partners, living together because they are in love, without a church wedding and without ever having children. We have friends, a straight couple, who have two children and a joint mortgage but are not legally married. Now, adults have the prerogative to mix and match the various things that make a marriage in whatever way they choose. It's just that when gay people do it, it's more obvious that "marriage" has already been deconstructed. I don't think that makes the institution of marriage weaker. I think that it makes all of us who are partnered more thoughtful about how we arrange our lives because we have to make deliberate decisions about so many aspects of our relationships.

Legalizing gay marriage in California doesn't mean that every minister in the state has to perform a wedding for two men. It does point out that there are many different ways to be married, and a church only has a say in one of them. The rest is controlled by banks, extended families, peer pressure, the individuals putting their lives together, and now, in California, the county clerk.

In almost every sense of the word, Ellen and I have been married for years. We had a religious wedding in 1996, long before we had any legal ties to each other. Our cousins came from out of town to eat a tiered cake decorated with buttercream and flowers. We have a joint mortgage and family health insurance. We get invited to parties as a couple. She talks to my dad on the phone more than I do. I cooked Christmas dinner for her parents. Ellen and I already have lots of legal paperwork: wills, the kids' birth certificates with both our names (I get to be "parent one" because I was pregnant and Ellen is "parent two" because she adopted them after they were born). We have the notarized form that documents our domestic partnership.

Domestic partnership in California is as strong as it can possibly be. For the purposes of the state, we have all the legal benefits of marriage. If Ellen owes someone money, they can go after my assets. We pay state taxes as a married couple.

So the piece of paper the Alameda County clerk is going to hand us on that summer morning really isn't worth much in terms of legal rights. Those are taken care of already. The clerk has no way to register an opinion about how much we love each other, what our families think, whether we have joint bank accounts or why I go to work and Ellen stays home with the children. This new summer marriage will only make us more married in one small way. There will be a piece of paper, a government form that says "marriage," and it will have space for both our names. The form the county is getting ready for this summer doesn't have spots for "bride" and "groom." You have to fill in "Party A" and "Party B." It's pretty graceless terminology. I don't care. That terminology was made with me in mind.

I've spent my whole life watching forms catch up with me. My white father was raised in the segregated South, in Alabama. He married my mother, who is Japanese American, in 1965. It wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws against interracial marriage. Though the legality of their marriage was never challenged, he did tell me that when he took my mother to Alabama to meet his family, he realized that they could never live comfortably in the South as an interracial couple. They settled in California.

When I was growing up, I'd have to fill out forms at school or the doctor's office that asked for my race. We could check only one box. I was never sure what to do. Sometimes I ignored the instructions and checked more than one. Sometimes I'd check "other," but that seemed to be kind of like checking "nothing." It was as if the person I was, both white and Japanese American, was outside the world of bureaucratic paperwork. Whatever I was, the person in the government office who would be filing my form couldn't even imagine me and didn't think I was worth extra space on federally issued ink and paper.

As I got older, sometime in the late 1980s, I started to see a change. For the census in 2000, the first time I filled out the questionnaire as an adult living on my own, I could finally check more than one race for the federal government. There were enough mixed-race people in the country that the form-writers and bureaucrats figured they'd better make space for us, too.

For the last 12 years, I've had a whole new form dilemma. When the form asks for my marital status, I'm back to not being sure what to check. It trips me up every time I go to a new doctor, or have some human resources form to fill out at work or apply for a mortgage. What I check depends on the situation I'm in. If the form has some kind of legal meaning, I check "single" even though I know that it's cutting Ellen out of the picture. If I check "married," which I sometimes do, I'm afraid that it will be misinterpreted to mean that I am married to a man with all of the federal benefits and responsibilities that go along with it.

So to me, the form the clerk will fill out will be the truly significant thing about our summer wedding. It's not just a piece of paper. It's a piece of paper that means the law in the state of California is catching up to me, just as those forms that asked about race finally started catching up to me around the time I was a teenager. I was always mixed race. Ellen and I have been married for more than a decade. We're just getting the random bored clerk in the county office to agree with us. This summer, I will fill out a new form that's just now catching up with who we've been all along.

There's a joke about what we'll do next month that I've heard too many times already. It's not very funny because the subtext isn't funny. It goes like this: What's the difference between gay marriage and straight marriage? With gay marriage, you have to get married over and over again to the same person. There are a lot of couples who are in the same position that Ellen and I find ourselves in. We had a religious ceremony and a domestic partnership. We got married in 2004, when San Francisco's City Hall was open to us for just a few weeks. We're a little tired of getting married. We want this time, at the office of the Alameda County clerk, to be the last.

My first marital spat with Ellen might be over who gets to be "Party A" and who has to be "Party B."