Just Married

Last Friday, January 3, 2025, I got married to my fiancé. You may all applaud.

We’ve been engaged since 2019, but neither of us were in much of a rush to plan an actual ceremony, not least because it’d be a lot of work to plan something appropriate that’d satisfy all the friends and family we have scattered around the country.

That changed with the 2024 election. California voters did vote to put marriage equality in the state constitution — something that was “de facto” accepted after Obergfell v. Hodges, but not explicitly guaranteed — but we’ve already seen how Republicans love to use LGBTQ people as fuel for their culture wars, to distract from their abject incompetence. I’m sure that the few remaining Republicans I still have any contact with would insist that there’s nothing to worry about, and that threats to reverse gay rights are just fear-mongering.

Which is, to put it mildly, complete bullshit. The most corrupt Supreme Court justices in my lifetime have been threatening to overturn marriage equality for a while already. And we’ve all seen first-hand how the Republican party went all-in on attack ads against transgender people during the election, something that curiously didn’t seem to bother all the “decent Republicans” we keep hearing about. It would be foolish for any gay couple not to protect themselves.

But I hate to cheapen any major life event with anything as stupid as American politics, so I’ll just say I’m glad we were incentivized to do it quickly. We got a license last month and scheduled a civil ceremony at the local city hall. My assumption was that we’d do a quick, bureaucratic, and unromantic ceremony first, and then have time to plan the “real” ceremony sometime in the future.

We may still have an additional ceremony and/or renew or vows at some point, but I was really touched by how special the day turned out to be. We invited several friends who live nearby, which had the unexpected but wonderful side-effect of having some of our oldest friends in attendance at our wedding. I had two of my very first friends in California present, from when I first moved to work at LucasArts. And J had friends from even farther back. I was so grateful they were willing to come out to Van Nuys on a Friday afternoon.

And the ceremony itself was surprisingly nice; clearly they wanted people to feel like their ceremony wasn’t in some impersonal space, but set up for a special memory. We got to say a few vows (which I had to come up with on the spot, which made me very emotional), and it was overall just a wonderful thing that I never would’ve expected from a local city hall.

Afterwards, we all went to a very nice restaurant, which J had found for our first anniversary dinner in California. We had a lot of food, talked about inessential things, but in a big group and in person, which is a rarity post-COVID and post-social media. I loved being able to spend the time with so many good people.

So basically: I highly recommend marrying somebody who still makes your heart go aflutter even after being together for 15 years. And I recommend doing it in a place where the emphasis is on the people, not the locale. Cynical me had been thinking about how much money we’d saved over having an expensive ceremony and reception, but now that I’m a week into being a married man, I think our wedding was perfect. It was all about love and hope and optimism, and nothing else.