Make no mistake: I was overjoyed at the Supreme Court’s decision to make gay marriage a legal thing in this country. Nine years ago, after spending five hours in the ER with my partner and after helping the doctor set his shattered leg, I was told that I could not accompany him to his hospital room because I was not family and visiting hours were over. When I insisted, they threatened to call security, and I had to leave. That, my friends, will never happen again – to me, or any other gay, legally married spouse. It will not happen in Mississippi, or Oregon, or Arkansas, or Iowa, or Florida, or New Hampshire.
I have been with my partner for 23 years now. In 1999, we were “un-legally” married in a really wonderful, Buddhist ceremony in the courtyard of a church here in Washington D.C. with 100 of our closest friends and family in attendance.
Three years ago, we were legally married by a justice of the peace in Prince George’s County, in a room with red paper hearts scotch taped to the windows and a bouquet of plastic flowers on a podium. Neither of us expected the whole “repeat after me” bit, but – who knew? – it is actually a part of the court’s ceremony, and we both read the vows, and we both choked up.
But here’s the thing: state-authorized love is suspect to me.
Love is big, and wild, and varied. It doesn’t play by our rules, by Congress’s rules, or by the Supreme Court’s rules. It is bigger than court rulings, bigger than people’s understanding of what their particular scripture might say, bigger than the underpinnings of their favorite psychological theory.
And you know what it’s really bigger than? Love is infinitely bigger than the fairy tale that we grew up with that one day we will fall in love with one person and stay with that person for the rest of our lives through thick or thin and if we don’t…if we stray from the path…if love catches us up and throws us down in unexpected ways, that we are broken, or have failed, or have sinned.
There are two things I hear from my clients who are experiencing relationship problems. First, that they feel like a failure, and second, complete and utter surprise when they start talking about it to friends and discover that they are not the only ones struggling in a relationship. As someone said to me recently, “Can you imagine if we put the same energy into facing the challenges of relationships as we do into projecting that everything is okay?”
Yes – imagine that!
This is the one thing that I want all my clients to know: if you are having relationship issues, you are not a failure. If you discover that you and your partner (or partners) share different values, you have not failed. If you have been married, divorced, and remarried, you did not fail. If you love and are committed to your partner and you find yourself in love with someone else as well, that doesn’t mean that there’s a predetermined outcome: ie, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed your first relationship, it doesn’t mean you will/won’t act on this new love, or that you are somehow broken/weak/sinful. It only means that love is boundless. Love is not bound by any parameters – it is our actions and behaviors in relationships that have boundaries, boundaries that change and evolve as we grow, and therefore depend on ongoing communication and honesty.
We are fooling ourselves if we think that there is some superhighway of love that we are all supposed to find and that we will just coast along once we find it.
We need to all be talking with each other about this more. Then, maybe we could switch from expending energy into projecting images of happy couple-dom, to actually doing the work that it requires to love and relate to another person.
