Meg is an ergonomist from upstate New York. Lauren, from Massachusetts, works in finance in the biotech industry. Meg and Lauren have lived in California for 25 years. They met in 1993 when Lauren interviewed Meg for a position in the research lab where Lauren worked.
Meg has always said that she could never be attracted to straight women since attraction is based on mutual chemistry, so when she met Lauren at the interview she thought, “Never say never because that woman really turned your head!” assuming Lauren was straight. After Meg was hired, Lauren knew she would be leaving the company in about 2 weeks and wanted to be sure Meg knew she was gay before she went. Both had lived in Boston for a time so Lauren made many references to gay bars there, but Meg was not out of the closet when she lived in Boston, so she missed them all.
They started dating when Meg invited Lauren to come have lunch at the lab in Berkeley where Meg was working. Meg says she was worried about having something Lauren would like to eat. “What if she likes yogurt? So I packed yogurt. Then I thought, I’ll make tuna sandwiches. But what if she’s vegetarian? So I made egg salad, too. And crudite. Like a lunatic! I had an entire cooler full of food.” They had a great lunch and “the energy started happening.” Meg missed all of Lauren’s hints again. After lunch they took a walk and in response to some question both have forgotten, Lauren said, “Well, as a gay person . . .” and Meg’s world began to spin. Her jaw dropped, and “everything changed. And everything made sense. But I remember thinking ‘oh my god, what are you going to do about it.’ And I remember Lauren saying, ‘But I’m leaving this job,’ and I said, ‘Oh! That’s great!’ ”
A few days later they met for a drink after work, “and it was one of these crazy things. We just couldn’t help it. After a bit our legs were touching. And then our two little arms were touching. And we talked and talked and talked like two little kids. At that point it was clear that it wasn’t about work.” Before their next date the following Saturday, Meg started trying on outfits for her friend JP. She came out in the first outfit and asked JP what she thought. Then she came out in the next outfit and said, “what do you think of this one?” JP asked what was different. “Well,” explained Meg, “that was a mock turtleneck and this is a real turtleneck.” Lauren breaks in, “But she wore the turtleneck and she was so cute!” Then adds, “I wore Chukka boots because that was the most lesbian thing I owned.” Meg adds, “and your white shirt, remember? You looked so cute.”
They had a commitment ceremony 5 years later. Lauren loves bicycle riding and hot tubs, and Meg hates both. So for Lauren’s birthday every year they go for a bike ride and then a soak. The year that Meg proposed, they were in the hot tub. Meg had thought about whether this was something she wanted to do. She says, “you know you’re compatible, but you wonder if that compatibility is a forever thing. Do you want to settle down? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with one person? Is this the right person? Are your differences advantages or issues?” She thought of her father and mother’s relationship, which she admired greatly. Her father had told her once that he thought a lot about whether he wanted to ask Meg’s mother to marry him, but that once he asked he never questioned it again. When Meg asked, in the hot tub, “Will you marry me?” Lauren said, “What?” She explains with a smile, “because I wanted to make her say it again.” Then she asked Meg, “Can we? Can we get married? I mean, yes, but how do we do this?” Meg said, “We can do whatever we choose to do.” She explains that at the time, in 1998, they had no role models. They knew no one who had had a commitment ceremony and neither of them had been to a commitment ceremony.
When they got out of the hot tub they went to their friends JP and Josh, a straight couple who they were staying with. JP and Josh, “treated it as if it were real. It was so validating.” JP asked all the questions: who will perform the wedding? Where will it be? Who will you invite? What will you use for vows? Both felt validated by having their friends take their decision to commit so seriously even though it would not be legally recognized.
The ceremony took place on October 25, 1998 in a sequoia grove at JP and Josh’s house. Lauren describes it as “one of the most serene, sacred places I have ever been.” Because the grove was small the ceremony had to be small. They each invited 3 friends and their partners. They decided not to invite their parents. Meg was not comfortable inviting her Irish Catholic parents because they “really struggled when I came out. They couldn’t have celebrated this. They were nice to Lauren, but they did not embrace it when I came out.” Lauren adds, “We knew that the ritual had to be for us. We didn’t want anyone there who was fundamentally uncomfortable with the concept. And so unfortunately that did mean that Meg’s parents were out of it. To keep things on a level field, I didn’t tell my parents, either, even though they had been very accepting and would have come. It has been unfortunate that I had to hide it from them. They noticed my ring immediately the next time they saw me. I told them, ‘oh, that’s something Meg gave me,’ and they didn’t ask any more questions.”
They wrote their own vows. A friend of theirs who had been studying Native American religions performed the ceremony. Given the location under the sequoias, they knew she was the right person for the role. There was no one from their own religious backgrounds to officiate. Meg says “I grew up in the Catholic Church, and I would have been perfectly willing to work for change in the church. I would have been an active Catholic. But that had to change because of the church’s attitude towards homosexuality. If the church had been nicer to me I would have stayed.” Lauren is Jewish, though not religiously much anymore. It is more about community for her, but she knew no rabbis at the time who would have blessed their union.
Meg and Lauren are godparents to JP and Josh’s daughter Zoe, who was the ring bearer at the ceremony. She was in 1st grade, and told some of her classmates. One of the boys told her, “you can’t be a ring bearer. Only boys are ring bearers. You have to be a flower girl.” Zoe talked to her father who told her that it was her decision and that Meg and Lauren would understand if she decided not to. She told him, “You know dad, I’m going to do it. Because I don’t think only boys can be ring bearers. I think a girl can be a ring bearer.” The thing Meg and Lauren love best about this story is that Zoe “didn’t blink about the fact that the ceremony was for two women.”
In 2004, they got married at City Hall in San Francisco. There was a sense of celebration and new beginning. They stood in line, and Meg says, “it was really a great time. There was this spirit of officialness. That someone was going to let you do this thing that you had never entertained a notion you could do. I had never, ever even thought about the concept of getting married officially. It just never occurred to me. And I found that time at City Hall so moving.”
At their commitment ceremony 9 years earlier, they said:
Today's ceremony has no legal meaning, yet, Meg and Lauren
view this fact as a passing moment in time. Future generations
will be given the privilege that is not theirs today. When gay
marriage becomes legally acknowledged, Meg and Lauren will
quietly pursue this, and will view that moment as a welcome
extension of today's marriage. We view this commitment.
ceremony with all of the significance and celebration intended,
while two people make the biggest commitment that they can
ever make to one another.
When they heard that Gavin Newsome had ordered City Hall to start issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples, they “quietly pursued this” without much discussion. “Our relationship had been perfectly intact through that time. So when we heard we knew we had to do it because we said we would do it.” Because both worked full time, they had to juggle work and standing in line for 2 or 3 days. They each took a turn standing in line while the other went to work. When they finally reached the front of the line, Meg called Lauren and told her she had a half hour to get there, so Lauren brought a coworker to join them as a witness.
At City Hall in 2004
When the 2004 marriages were invalidated they were heartbroken. “I felt like someone had ripped something out of my heart,” says Lauren. “I was in disbelief. We had gotten married at City Hall. How could someone just take it away? And it just happened. We just got a letter in the mail asking if we wanted to donate the money we had paid for our marriage license, or if we wanted the money back. We had gotten new wedding bands for that event, and when the marriages were invalidated we both took those rings off and put them away and are now wearing our old rings. We have a certain amount of anger towards those rings. We felt violated. And we had to go back to work the next day and not talk about it because people can’t understand what that felt like. One day you’re married and celebrating that commitment, and nothing had happened in our relationship but at the end of the day, we were no longer married.”
They visited an attorney who helped them draft the documents they needed to ensure that each would be protected if one got sick or died. So when the California legislature passed the law giving domestic partners the same rights and responsibilities as married couples, nothing really changed for them.
In 2008, though, “that was real. It was clear to me that times had changed. This is so real. It’s very different from before, where you invite 2 or 3 people and don’t tell your family. Times had changed. I told all the important people at my work including my coworkers and my boss.” Lauren says, “In a way it was funny because we were excited about our friends’ weddings and Meg and I couldn’t quite complete a conversation about our own plans, even though we knew we were going to do it. It felt like ‘here we go again. Let’s get out the old vows.’ ” They were married on October 24, since they wanted to stay close to their original anniversary date and the 25th was a Saturday. They did not want a big party, so they just invited a few friends.
This time, though, Meg's father had passed away and they decided to tell Meg's mother. She was very happy for them and sent a beautiful crystal candle holder with a heart painted on it. The next time she visited and saw the candle holder sitting on a bookcase she gently scolded, "But I wanted you to put it next to a picture of the two of you!"
I ask if anything has changed for them since getting married, and what that means to them. Lauren says, “I was very excited about being able to go to work, go to HR and change all of my paperwork to ‘married.’ It meant being validated. I have been married since the day of our commitment ceremony in my heart and how I conduct myself and how I live my life. And to have that validated in the way our straight counterparts are validated felt so exciting. To be able to say in a conversation, ‘my spouse and I . . . .’ and have it not be a big deal that the spouse is another woman. The recent election was a real slap in the face about how far away we still are from that. The inner core is very strong; I know exactly what my commitment is.”
Meg adds, “I wish I had been more active in meeting people who don’t know us. Because our relationship is very special, but it’s so not radical. It’s just not whatever it is people are worried about.” Lauren continues, “We are responsible mature adults who stand up in the community and pay our taxes, you know? I don’t understand why people who gain nothing by taking the right to marriage away from us feel they gain something by that. On a romantic level, the 2008 marriage didn’t change anything. But I felt it was a responsibility for gay couples who had a commitment, who were ‘married,’ to go get married. It didn’t occur to me that people would push so hard when they gain nothing by taking it away from us.”
I ask what defines their marriage. “Joy, love, partnership, happiness, seeing each other through life’s struggles.” Lauren says, “When I come home from work I celebrate that I’m going to see Meg at the end of the day. Having dinner with her is the high point of every day. It’s simple stuff. We are just regular people. There is nothing special or different about our relationship in the joy it brings us. We have built what other people aspire to. The most profound thing about the gay weddings is that straight people when they get married, they are starting on a journey and hoping something will come true; that they will stay in love and build a life together. And in 2004 and 2008, we went to City Hall and stood with people who had already done that. They were celebrating something that had already happened and not just the hope.”
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