Our Marriage Story

In the midst of this transition, we got married. Believe it or not, compared to dealing with the stuff and all those other stresses, this was relatively easy and actually quite lovely. Here’s the story…

When we first moved to D.C., about four years ago, we decided to take a long weekend and go to a B&B in Delaware. While we were there, in rural Delaware but also near the sea, we chatted with the owners as we always do when we go to B&Bs. I mentioned that I wanted to try to teach art, and the owner, handed me a flyer with the name of a church and a D.C. pastor who wanted to start art programs with inner city kids. I gratefully accepted the flyer, but then I filed it away with all my other job hopeful literature.

Fast forward four years to this spring when my colleague, America, encouraged me to begin writing an art and drama curricula for a children’s summer camp. America saw a need early on for this. My students, parents of elementary age kids, all lived close to their kids’ school, and there was no park or place for the kids to go during the summer. There also weren’t enough enrichment programs, so the kids’ reading levels were dropping. America told me, “Oh you have to meet this pastor. She is great, and we can host the camp at her church.”

Yes, it was the same woman. Pastor Karen. And amazing she is.

When I meet people who have devoted their lives to spirituality, I have mixed feelings. Often, they are too far away. I feel like I can’t talk to them. If they are dogmatic about their beliefs, well, then I can’t talk to them at all. It’s not that I don’t respect their passion. I’ve known artists who can’t talk about much except art. I’ve known poets who can barely talk at all in social settings, but when you read their writing, you are blown away. So I get it that sometimes when you’re so “in” something, it’s difficult to see outside yourself. But this still makes conversation, discussion difficult. Not with Karen.
She is one of the coolest women I have ever met.

To introduce herself to the team of women who would be working on the camp, she read us a children’s story called City Angel. The story reflected how she felt about residents in a city, all the residents in a city, what they needed, how they deserved respect. She didn’t have to say these things. She let the story say it. I immediately respected her. She wasn’t just a pastor. She was a teacher too.

After Benjamin and I knew that we’d be moving to Europe, we talked about getting married before we left. It was a really natural discussion as we have talked about this before over the years. We didn’t want to get married until it was legal for our gay friends and members of our family to get married. State by state was fine, but we felt it should be legal in the whole country. So we never did it. But making this huge leap across the pond made us think that we wanted to commit even further, and well, when we learned that gay marriage was legal in Germany, this was easier.

Enter Karen again. In the church where she is pastor, tolerance is key. The congregation respects marriage equality, and Karen has married several gay couples. After a meeting to check in with the camp curricula, I told her our story. I explained how Benjamin and I felt, and I shyly asked her if she would marry us. She answered yes. We could keep it simple, just the two of us and her, and we could do the ceremony right in her office. Excellent.

Skip to the night before our ceremony. Benjamin and I were surprisingly nervous. We knew we needed to write vows for one another, and god knows we’ve said some Romantic stuff to each other over the years, but we never had to say stuff in front of someone like this before. So we had to think about it like a gig, the most important gig of our lives. And as far as the vows were concerned, we had to think of them as letters we would read to each other.

So the morning of our wedding, we got up early. We dressed like we were performing. I wore my black and red rockabilly dress and black lace up boots, and he wore a black button down with a red tie, and of course his famous white sneakers (they had red stripes, this was important–ha ha). We gathered a bouquet of daffodils, scooped up our vows and readings, and decided to be good citizens and take the bus to the church. We were so proud of ourselves, and it was a gorgeous spring day.

Well, after we got upstairs and knocked on the door, lo and behold, we realized that forgot the marriage certificate. The one document that Karen needed to sign to make the whole thing legal. Fortunately, we were early. So like a trooper, Benjamin ran to catch the next bus, ran back to our apartment to get the document, and ran to catch the same bus back in time. He describes this as “like a scene in The Graduate.” And it was quite the funny scene.

We went back to Karen’s office. She had arranged some saints, a candle, and some pussy willows on her office mantle. We added the daffodils, and stood next to one another. Karen began with some lovely words. We recited our vow-letters and made each other cry and laugh. Karen laughed too. Then she read our readings–Corinthians 13, a Buddhist quote, and some Tom Waits and Bob Dylan lyrics–totally us. She blessed our rings, and wed us. It was sweet and simple. Just like we wanted.