After 8 years of being together, Christina and I are finally getting married. Until recently, I held a negative notion of marriage. It was mostly a reaction to the expected social norm. I didn’t want to be like “everyone else,” thus I didn’t want to get married. How could I fit into this category of being “radical” and be married?

“Who cares what the state defines our relationship as,” I told Christina. She confessed what she really wanted was a public expression of our love and commitment as well as a gathering with our family and friends. We settled on eventually having a commitment ceremony of sorts.

Yet I recently have been making an effort to be less rigid and more open-minded. This constant questioning has worked for me so far, and at the very least has made for some interesting experiences. I began thinking that if I really didn’t care about what the state classified me as, than why did it matter if I got married or not.

I realized that I was holding out because it actually boiled down to selfishness. I wanted to take the easy path and have the ultimate say and control over things. Staying unmarried and unofficially “committed” provided less responsibility and more leeway to do as I pleased, like possibly ending the relationship if our “paths diverged.”

This excuse eventually began to make less and less sense to me. Christina and I have basically grown up together. We have gone through the extremes of co-dependence to mutually hurtful experiences, but I feel now we have been able to begin striking a balance. For me, we already have repeatedly demonstrated our commitment and unconditional love to one another. Essentially, I already feel “married.”

I think of Christina as a member of my immediate family. I would say that she is one of the most loving people I know. When I first met her, I did not really consider anyone else but myself. She basically taught me what I know about loving and compassion. At the same time, I think whenever you are intimately involved with someone and living with them for multiple years, clashes and conflicts happen. This has been undoubtedly been exacerbated by my judgmental and patriarchal assertive tendencies. One thing that has helped us has been to remember we are in this together and that we love each other, despite our imperfections in all their glory.