Thank you so much for such a beautiful tribute here on your site.

The experience was extremely surreal. You get to the courthouse and first have to go through the metal detectors. Laurie (our witness) got a picture of me either removing or attempting to put back on my belt – which had set the device off.

From there “it’s like going to the DMV, and then all of a sudden you go into this room and it’s pretty,” described the waiter at Mo’s where we went out to lunch afterwards of his marriage experience last week. It’s an apt description.

We went into this like we do so many things – after an overly long period of thinking about it, we simply jumped in impulsively.

No matter what happens on Tuesday, our relationship isn’t going anywhere. So the question came down to “Do we want to get married and risk some constitutional amendment take our marriage away? Or do we want to wait and risk that same amendment remove the chance to do so in the future?” Both options seemed pretty bleak in the face of the angry mob pushing for it’s right to discriminate.

Turning the question around, instead of focusing on “should we?” I looked at it from a “why shouldn’t we?” perspective. We couldn’t come up with a good reason not to go through with it.

So, a phone call later, and we have an appointment for Thursday at 11:30. At first we had thought of telling no one, since there was no time to tell everyone. But, given the choice of a witness we know having his or her signature on our legal document, or some random stranger, the personal touch won out.

We called Laurie – David’s “date” before I came along and stole him away – and asked her to do the honors. She was more excited about it all than we were.

Still thinking we should keep this all pretty hush-hush to get it done with before the election, and figure out what to do for friends and family later, I simply marked my calendar as busy and told my employee I’d be working from home. My boss had just the day before said that he didn’t care how I worked as long as I got my work done, so I took that to mean if I skipped out and got married during an extra long lunch I didn’t need to ask permission first.

I’d already had one conversation with a coworker who believes that his right to his definition of marriage trumps my concern for losing the equal rights we share today, and didn’t want to risk getting into those kinds of conversations with either my management or my direct report in case they had similar crazy ideas.

David, however, has a very supportive group of coworkers. He told his boss Norma that he had an appointment… and his coworker, Dina, at the same time, since Dina is the one who divides up all the work, and he didn’t want her assigning things while he wasn’t going to be there working on them. Then he told them both what the appointment was for. They were overjoyed, and instantly invited themselves along.

Norma and Dina brought bouquets of flowers for each of us to hold – a nice touch. Having the three of them there to witness the event was nice. It really would have been anticlimactic to sign some papers and say vows in front of just strangers.

Now we need to see what happens on Tuesday, and either way there will likely be a fight over what it all means. All that aside, we need to figure out what to do for everybody else who wasn’t there, now that we made sure to get legal before that chance could be taken away.

I’m open to suggestions.