Married-Married, by Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade is the author of ten collections of poetry and prose,
most recently Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX:
Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of the
AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Forthcoming in 2018 are her new
poetry collection, Same-Sexy Marriage, and a co-authored collection with
Denise Duhamel, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose. Wade teaches in
the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

About the work:
For a long time, as a woman who makes her life with another woman, I felt
ambivalence toward the institution of marriage. It’s hard to seek to join a club
that has always denied you as a potential member. After the Windsor decision
of 2013, my partner and I were excited by the prospect of national recognition,
social legitimacy at last. We married legally after more than eleven years together.
Coming out for us, already a fraught social ritual, has now been complicated by
marriage, as we are coming out not only as lesbians but as married lesbians--a
fact which is sometimes harder for others to believe or accept than our sexual
orientations. This micro-essay is part of a series of short pieces that addresses
such daily complications.