The Saturday night after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015, I was on the street outside the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan doing an on-the-fly interview with Courtney Love, of all people. I asked her a few questions about the Pride event going on inside the venue before releasing her into the wild. But as she walked away, she turned back and shouted, “Oh, by the way, congrats on the…” and pointed to the ring finger on her left hand.

I laughed. “Lady,” I shouted back, “I’m not the marrying kind.”

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Not a lot has changed in the past decade on that front. I still don’t think I’m the marrying kind any more than I did when I was 32 and trying to impress Courtney-effing-Love with my contrarian snark amid a genuinely historic victory for LGBTQ+ rights. And I remain resolutely disinclined to investigate this self-conception particularly closely. (Though, I’d hazard to guess that a therapist might chalk it up to some confluence of my slightly antisocial personality; the dismal examples of marriage set for me by my parents and their friends, all of whom seemed to actively hate their spouses; and growing up in an era in which legal same-sex marriage was not yet on the menu.)

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This is the story I tell myself, anyway — that marriage is bourgeois, is basic; that it’s an institution that privileges those of us lucky enough to find someone we think we can tolerate being around for the rest of our lives; that foolish people rush into it because it’s what they believe they’re supposed to do; that it’s perilously fragile; that it’s not for me.

And yet, here is the thing that, as a 40-something-year-old confirmed bachelor with zero matrimonial prospects on the horizon, I rarely admit to anyone: I really, really want to have a wedding someday. As I’ve watched friends and family, both queer and straight, tie the knot over the past 10 years, I’ve gradually — and honestly not even 100-percent consciously — been cultivating a vision of my own dream nuptials. And in much the same way that the name Obergefell apparently lives rent-free in Clarence Thomas’s and Samuel Alito’s heads, that vision lives in mine.

It’s really a mélange of a lot of different influences and pop cultural references — as I assume most people’s concepts of their ideal weddings are — some of which actually even predate Obergefell. So far as I can remember, I think the basic foundation came from seeing photos of Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s 2002 wedding, which took place on a beach in the Hamptons. The vibe was casually elegant, conveying that while this was an occasion, no one was taking the institutional trappings and formal expectations too seriously. The Long Island setting also recalled The Great Gatsby, and ever since, I’ve imagined my reception as a Gatsby-esque party at a big house overlooking the water, where all the out-of-town guests would spend the whole wedding weekend together.

I’m from a small coastal town in North Carolina, and I’ve decided that I’d like to get married there, partly because my hometown is genuinely beautiful, and partly to deny any less-than-supportive relatives an excuse not to attend. If they’re going to snub my gay wedding, they’re going to have to be up-front about why.

The reception has kind of always been the main focus for me, especially after I read Dan Savage’s 2005 book, The Commitment, in which he recounts how he and husband Terry Miller decided to have a big party to celebrate their relationship instead of a formal wedding ceremony. That’s pretty much what I want: a big party with all of my friends and family coming together to celebrate in a way that people only ever seem to feel obligated to do when it’s a wedding. It will be in a big white tent outside, with tons of string lights. My husband and I will dance to “Sara” by Fleetwood Mac for our first dance, and cabaret artist and MacArthur genius Justin Vivian Bond will perform after dinner, and there will be fireworks, and, ideally, fireflies. Insofar as I have thought about any type of ceremony, I think I’d like to walk down the aisle to Sinéad O’Connor’s “The Wolf is Getting Married.” But maybe that’s a little too on-the-nose…

The only part I can’t really imagine is the other groom. (Although “other” doesn’t seem especially accurate here, as I am clearly verging on bridezilla territory.) And the cynic in me has to wonder if this whole thing is a supremely narcissistic fantasy. It’s all about me, and god help the hypothetical man who is fool enough to 1) ask me to marry him and 2) believe that his own opinions vis-à-vis wedding planning will be considered. Do I just think I want a wedding because what I really want is a huge, elaborately produced celebration of myself, like every bride who ever bankrupted and traumatized her family so that she could feel like a princess for a day? Possibly. Probably?

But I don’t know. Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe that story I tell myself about marriage not being for me really is, as that imaginary therapist might point out, just the result of a lot of underexamined nonsense. (I refuse to entertain the word “trauma” here.) The fact that I’ve dreamed up this fantasy wedding proves that I’m clearly wrong in thinking that not a lot has changed for me in the past 10 years. 

When same-sex marriage became legal across the U.S. in 2015, I could afford to be flippant about it. We’d won. The right to marry seemed secure. I could say, Great news, thank you very much, but this had very little to do with me. But when Thomas and Alito signaled in 2020 and again in 2022 that they were eager to reconsider Obergefell, I was surprised how personally I took it. It felt like not only an attack on LGBTQ+ rights and equality, but like an attack on a potential future that, without even really realizing it, I’d been dreaming up for myself. That’s not a feeling I could have imagined back in 2015.

So, maybe what I’m finally learning — or unlearning — is something all those people who fought so hard for marriage equality learned a long time ago, and that, hopefully, a generation of queer kids who are just entering adulthood have been fortunate enough to believe from the jump: that marriage is for us, if we want it.

I mean, obviously, I’m not going to resolve any of this stuff about whether or not I’m “the marrying kind,” or what that even means, here. What I am realizing, though, is that my big, probably unrealistic wedding fantasy is more important to me than my cooler-than-thou cynicism about marriage, and, more importantly, that it’s not particularly useful, is borderline irresponsible to hold onto that cynicism at a time when the hard-won right to marry is potentially at risk.

I don’t know if I will ever meet someone who wants to marry me, or if I will want to marry them if they ask me, and I’m okay with that. But I also know that I want to let go of this belief that marriage is not for me. Because that’s what Thomas and Alito and all those state legislators calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell believe.

So, I’ll go on adding songs to the wedding reception playlist I’ve been putting together, and thinking about blue hydrangea and honeysuckle table arrangements. I’m sure the groom part will sort itself out.

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