It’s the double aughts so it’s tough to assume anything these days. I must admit that when I realized how dreamy Mitch was in the weeks following our initial encounters I did think to myself, "Maybe I’ll marry Mitch. He is SO dreamy." In fact, I am pretty sure that some of my friends have letters detailing how sexy, and smart, and funny, and stylish, and witty, etc. etc. (in vomitous detail) I thought Mitch was and what a mega-ultra-dreamy dream team I thought we made (as my friend Mandy might say). So some part of me certainly assumed that some day I would get married. I still think all those things about Mitch and I still think all those things about us together, but deciding to get married was a bit of a metaphysical struggle for us. When you are a big contrarian like I am, and you spend a lot of time trying to be all rad and question assumptions and raise hell then when it comes time to decide what to do next in THE RELATIONSHIP, if anything at all, you start to wonder what you should do. Should you get married? Why do people get married? What does it mean to get married? With a 50% divorce rate and a bunch of socio-biological hacks telling me that monogamy might not be the strategy that humans are "evolved" for, yadda yadda yadda. I mean, a gal starts to wonder. For that matter, a guy starts to wonder too. Mitch certainly did his share of wondering.

So what did we think as we hemmed and hawed? Well, you know a lot of people get married. A lot of people that I like and respect get married (my parents for instance, Mitch’s parents, Muhammad Ali). But then again, we live in a country where homosexuals can’t get married, which makes me really not want to get married (who wants to belong to a club if your friends can’t join???).

So there are the cons: 1) lot’s of people get divorced. 2) homosexual couples can’t get married. 3) people call you so and so’s wife (Not my favorite self reference). 4) getting married is a pain in the ass involving lots of trivial decisions, finding dresses, buying rings, etc.

And then there are the pros: 1) in the good old u. s. of a. if you’re married people take your relationship seriously, whereas if you’re not, people often don’t (take it seriously that is). 2) you get to have a big party with all your friends and people cry and you get to have sort of a relationship retrospective. 3) your families get officially joined together YAY! 4) when babies pop out they get to officially have a dad! 5) getting married is scary and sometimes scary is good. 6) HALF! 7) did i mention a big party? 8) you have to get up in front of all your friends and family and commit yourself to someone other than yourself. I’m all for striving for commitment to things beyond yourself. I know marriage is the most typical type of commitment beyond yourself commitment but you have to start somewhere and a marriage is what you make it. 9) although I like things as they are sometimes change is good.

So you can see that the pros outweigh the cons although that isn’t why we decided to get married. Ultimately we just love each other with big buckets ‘o love, colonel style (that one’s for you Phil) and so getting married seemed like a good thing to do.