Quodlibets

One of many posts on marriage and weddings

I obviously have complicated feelings about weddings and marriage, which you know if you read this blog for the course of its life before the hiatus.

Nonetheless, Sam and I are doing both--having a wedding and entering into a marriage.  You should know from the outset that there won't be any romantic talk about how it's my day, or how we're starting a new life together, or how much I love him and can't wait to spend my life with him.  I've already BEEN spending my life with him, and suffice it to say that there are still enough gooey feelings in place to convince me that in another 8, 10, 15, 30 (or until the mortgage is paid, ha!) we'll be still hanging onto gooey feelings.

But put simply, we are not getting married because we are in love.  I'm not deliberately being anti-romantic, but when we discussed getting married (which we did), and when we decided to go for it (which we did), love was never part of the equation.  I think both of us understand that the love is there, otherwise why would we even be discussing it?  The fact is, when we entered a 30-yr mortgage together, we made a practical commitment to one another, and it was an acknowledgment of how we feel about one another.  A practical acknowledgment.  The marriage part that followed the mortgage is an acknowledgment that there are some practical benefits of marriage given to us by the government and private companies, and we would like to be able to take advantage of these if we need to.  (I'm speaking of health insurance, above all else.) 

Now, I have incredibly conflicting feelings about this, because I feel a serious sense of guilt that I can get married legally and friends of mine (no exaggeration) cannot.  Because they are gay.  I've often said that I wouldn't get married as long as homosexuals could not, and I find to my sadness that I'm going to.  I could probably wait; the mortgage was the commitment, after all.  But what if (holy crap I hope not) Sam loses his job in retail, and he's without health insurance?  What if (holy motherf-ing crap I hope not) something happens to one of us, something impairing?  Realistically, our families would NEVER ever do anything contrary to our wishes, but at the same time, the best protection in this instance is marriage.  It is what it is.

So we're doing it, regardless of the complicated feelings on my end (and the complicated feelings on his?  Not sure.) and again, it is what it is.

This post is mostly addressing the marriage side of this equation, and the actual marriage--the day to day, the living together, the loving him--that's going to be the easiest part of all of this.  I don't think anything will change from how we are right now, to be honest.  It's the abstract feelings about it that get in the way. 

And then, there is the wedding.  That's for another post.  Probably more than one.

It's so weird to be back here

When I stopped blogging a year ago, it was in the run-up to an election I was becoming increasingly convinced my side was going to win.  And it scared the bejesus out of me; four years before that, I had started the blog as a vehicle for my frustration over the upcoming election, and we lost that one.  (We lost that one, and I don't know if it was the election, or the move that came at the tail end of election season, or the fact that I quit my job [where I'd been working with Sam], or the fact that I was starting an academic certificate program that I felt pretty damn bad about, or what, but I ended up being seriously depressed that winter.  And it was a really bad time in our lives, and I didn't want a repeat of that, if my side lost.)  So anyway, I was scared that we'd lose, or maybe even I was scared that we'd win, and I wasn't sure how to blog about that.

I stopped blogging because I didn't know what to say anymore about politics, and I increasingly had nothing at all to say about my life, because I was having a hard time concentrating on anything except the drama unfolding at a national level.  And I had NOTHING to say about that drama, because what was there to say?  I wanted Obama to win desperately.  I was nervous and giddy when it seemed like he was pulling away with the election, and then terrified that my mounting excitement would jinx the whole thing.

I never said it was a smart reaction, ok? 

So I stopped, and I intended to only stop until after the election.  But then the stoppage turned into a few months, and then more months, and then Sam and I were buying a condo, and I couldn't blog about that, and then Sam and I were talking about getting married, and I couldn't blog about that, and then I was applying to grad school, getting in, spending ten days in prison-like Champaign, and I couldn't blog about that.

It's not that I didn't want to, per se.  I just forgot how.  I mean, I just forgot how it felt to blog about the stuff happening to you, even the big stuff.  I thought about blogging all the time.  Typepad is my freaking homepage, for goodness' sake.  I just couldn't make my fingers type.

So here it is: Sam and I bought a condo.  We moved in, and we love it.  We're getting married next June on our eighth anniversary.  It flowed out of the condo purchase, honestly.  I've started grad school; I'm getting my MLIS (slowly, slowly) from the University of Illinois--Urbana Champaign through their LEEP program. 

My facebook description for months now has been: Things are happening.  That's right.  Things. Are. Happening. 

That list encompasses the "things", and I'm going to (slowly) start talking about them here.