My thoughts on Gay Marriage

OK...so I'm going to turn some friends into blog fodder...you know who you are, and you'll forgive me for it eventually.

I get a lot of random questions about the whole "marriage" thing. A surprising number of folks don't really understand that we aren't (and can't be) legally married. Those who do get that part are slightly confused by how we pick and choose the marriage norms we want to include in our life. For instance:

I saw a couple of friends yesterday, and was talking about "the wife". Somebody was apparently confused by me using that term and so the statement was made "well I guess that makes you the husband". Uhhh...no. Really no. A brief primer on marital terminology:

Wife: The female in the relationship

Husband: The male in the relationship

Spouse: A generic term that can be used to describe either person

And the gay side of relationship terminology:

Partner - the significant other, a term very similar in definition to spouse, but without all the heterosexual implications

Life Partner - same sort of definition, but for those who are afraid that using the term "Partner" may be misconstrued to mean that the person you live with is somehow a business partner.

For many years, I used partner. These days, I figure I'm going to even up the playing field, and used the generally accepted marital terminology, as I consider my relationship to be a marriage. So, yes, we are both considered the wife...as we are both female. The comment was made during this conversation that why don't I just call her "the spouse" - which I guess would work, but we'd still both be "the spouse", so I'm not sure how that would make it any more clear about who is who.

More confusion on gay marriage:

Kind of along the same lines...but we don't necessarily have gender roles. We are women, and we both are pretty feminine. But, since there isn't a guy around, we have to do some of the "traditional" guy things, like fixing stuff, building stuff, and doing car stuff. That doesn't make us masculine...it just means that we're too
cheap and resourceful to outsource those things. So questions like "who's
the guy?" really confuse us - I thought the boobs and "lesbian" classification
cleared up the fact that there isn't one. (Although, we readily recognize
that some lesbians are masculine, and some gay men are feminine in nature, but
that doesn't mean everyone is.)

Our relationships are not fundamentally different from heterosexual relationships. We have fights and general marital conflicts. There isn't a rule book for us that is separate and different...we have the challenges of living together, making decisions together, and still fight over who hogs the blankets at night. We're pretty normal.

For the life of me, I can't figure out why people are so scared of gay folks marrying, but that's a rant for another blog post. Hopefully you all won't notice that when I use the term "the wife", I am actually communicating in the secret gay code language that we use in our quest for world domination. :-)