No matter what: 30 years and 10 years, the real story (or part of it)

Ringshots from 1993 (top, by Mark Tiedemann) and 2013 (by Jennifer Durham)

Image description: Two photos of two white women’s hands. The top photo is in colour; each woman wears a single gold band on their ring finger. The photo below is in black and white; each woman wears two gold bands on their ring finger.

On this day 30 years ago Kelley and I got married for the first time—in our back garden in Atlanta surrounded by about fifty of our family and friends. We gave each other a 14ct gold wedding band. The marriage had no legal force.

Exactly 20 years later we got married again, this time before a judge and attended by fourteen family and friends. We gave each other an 18ct gold wedding band which we wore next to the first. And this time it was a legal ceremony, and our marriage was—and is—valid all over the world.

I’ve talked about this many times. What I haven’t talked about before is how the world of difference between the two weddings (seriously, the world of 1993 was very different to that of 2013) made no difference at all to the bedrock meaning of our vow.

Georgia in 1993: I had published some short stories and my first novel, Ammonite—which because of the way the mass market original paperback contract was structured would never make me any royalties. (That’s a whole other story that I may tell one day.) Kelley was earning $31k a year at an environmental-engineering company—she had health insurance, I didn’t. (This was in the days before domestic partnership and their healthcare advantages—y’know, such as they were.) I had just been diagnosed with MS (diagnosis and treatment was costing us a fortune). I was on an H1B visa which was about to expire (immigration attorneys and application fees were costing us a fortune). I had just about finished Slow River; Kelley had published some short stories. We had bought a neglected, ramshackle little house that backed onto a nature preserve that we were slowly making liveable (asbestos removal and lead paint mitigation had cost us a fortune). We were broke and beyond broke, with credit card debit almost equal to our annual income.

I would wake up every day and go to my desk and look at the money charts on the wall showing where we were—barely keeping up with interest payments on the debt—read another email from another immigration lawyer saying, ‘Are you famous? No? Then I can’t help you,’ open another bill from the hospital for IV MS treatment, and wonder how we would survive, and where we might be living in a year. And then remember that where we were living, in Georgia, it was, literally, illegal for Kelley and I to have sex.

We needed help. We needed support. We needed to affirm to ourselves and to each other that no matter the odds stacked against us, no matter how sick I got or how long I had left (all I knew about MS then was the story of Jacqueline Dupree) we were going to love and live our lives happily and together. And that, I thought, is what a wedding is for: to stand before family and friends, declare our love, and then rely on the community we had brought together that day to help us remember that love and determination when things got really bad. The more we thought about it, the more it made sense: we should get married.

The problem was, it didn’t make sense to anyone else on the planet. In June I told my family in England we were going to get married and my two straight sisters said, Ah. Well, I can’t come that day (we hadn’t even named a date), my queer sister said, Why on earth would you want to do that? My mother was unhappy but I don’t remember which bit bothered her most, but my father… My father was personally offended. Don’t be ridiculous, Nicola. And why on earth would you want to rub peoples’ noses in it? As if our relationship was, literally, dogshit. None of my family had ever seen fit to visit me in the US in the four years I’d lived there—they just hadn’t though tit worth it because of course all unnatural lesbian relationships failed so I’d be coming home to the UK soon enough; why waste money?—and now it looked as though they never would.

But if I’d let me family’s approval influence my behaviour I’d either be dead (like my two queer sisters) or still living in Leeds with children and grandchildren, like my two straight sisters. So, fuck it. We told Kelley’s folks next. I admit I don’t remember their initial response but bother her mother and stepfather and father and stepmother had always, always supported her choices and kept their own counsel regarding their feelings on the matter. They said they would come to the wedding—including Kelley’s four stepbrothers. So we went ahead and picked a date and then told everyone else, and sent out invitations. Our friends, gay and straight, responded with a mix of Yes! And, Oof, I’m sorry, I can’t afford the trip.

So we started planning. We allotted ourselves $500 for the entire wedding: food, drink, venue, flowers, clothes, invitations—excluding the rings. It was more than we could afford but we had to spend something. Venue: no brainer, it would have to be in our back garden; it was free. Flowers: one of Kelley’s co-workers’ sweeties was a florist; we got table arrangements for free. Clothes: we had no clue what to wear—white dresses? sharp suits?—or where to get them or how to afford them. Kelley’s mum stepped in a said, Find a local dressmaker and I’ll pay. One of ur friends knew a wonderful design student who was delighted to make us something as an experiment: I got a simple bias-cut dress in white charmeuse (I learnt the words bias-cut and charmeuse)—long-sleeved to hide all the terrible bruising and IV marks—and Kelley got one in a slightly different style with short sleeves. Catering: we found a local caterer who would come to the house and grill salmon and chicken and asparagus, do a baked brie (we didn’t know any vegans) and made a pretty two-tiered carrot cake for a ‘very reasonable price’—and when she saw our faces fall at the ‘reasonable’ (over our entire budget) she made it self-serve, added the rental of tables, chairs, glassware etc., and knocked 15% off. The drinks: one of our friends was learning to make mead; he brought enough mead for everyone, and we bought some sparkling water and generic sparkling wine for the toasts (plus two bottles of Taittinger just for us—I wasn’t going to start my married life with crap wine…). Then the rings. Remember, we had no money. Remember, no one in the world was doing this. We had some vague idea that maybe as our situation was unique we should have unique rings. We went to a jeweller, who showed us all kinds of strange silver designs and we nodded and asked questions and all the time our gazes kept straying to the rows of traditional gold rings. Neither of us acknowledged that fact because it just felt too overwhelming—suddenly real, suddenly and oddly both traditional and dangerous.

We went home and decided to try again the next week. When we did, we both just stopped next to the wedding ring case, looked at each other, and said, ‘Those.’ It turned out if we went for the cheapest gold and paid a bit per month, we could more or less manage it. So we paid our money, ordered them to be engraved N&K: No matter what and K&N: No matter what, and went home smiling.

Then, the basics taken care of, we considered the fiddly bits: Public announcements and registering our gift list. And this is when it truly came home to us how new what we were doing was. Long story short (it’s a good story—and I’ll tell it another time), we were the first queer couple to announce our wedding in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the first queer couple to register at Macy’s.

Meanwhile, we were beginning to realise everyone who was accepting our invitation was nervous. They didn’t know what to expect. They didn’t know what to wear. They didn’t know what their role would be. Would it be some weird wiccan ritual where people would have to turn to this way and that as we called the four winds? Or lay their gifts on an altar with dildos on it? Some well-meaning non-denominational do-gooder in a badly-embroidered white robe entreating people to be kind to each other and bless our holy union? Someone smudging everything and making everyone cough? Should they dress for a summer wedding or a queer orgy?

It was time to turn our attention to the wedding itself. We didn’t want a religious ceremony. We couldn’t have a legal ceremony. I had zero interest in any kind of woo spiritual thing. I just wanted us to promise to love each other forever and for our witnesses to understand why and what that meant and commit to being our community and support and then to have a bloody good party. But given everyone’s uncertainty we’d need someone to MC, a front-of-house person people could ask questions of and follow their lead while Kelley and I were dressing/drinking/freaking out/throwing up/running away (or whatever we might be doing on the actual day).

Kelley’s friend Ronnie was happy to take the job. She worked in theatre and was used to stage managing. Then we roped in a few friends and Kelley’s stepbrothers to act as ushers. Then Kelley and I figured out the shape of our wedding. People would arrive. Ronnie’s husband, Dan, would be bar tender offering mimosas or sparkling water. Music would start. Kelley and I would walk together to the front of garden. Ronnie would explain why we were all there and the order of events. Then we would each read excerpts from our letters to each during the year we spent apart. Then any members of the audience who wanted to speak could say a few words. Then Kelley and I would made our vows to each other. Then we would eat and drink and party til the sun went down or we ran out of comestibles.

By this time it was mid-August, two or three weeks before the wedding. Things were trundling along. I wasn’t feeling well but trying to ignore it. My mother called—we usually chatted a couple of times a week—and asked how the wedding prep was going. I said it seemed to be moving along; our rings would come soon; we’d sorted the catering. What were we having? Everything grilled. What were our colours? I blinked—our what? ‘Your colours, Nicola, your theme.’ Uh, I said, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. A beat of silence. ‘Well. I see I’ll have to come and sort things out.’

When Kelley got home from work she found me stalking around the house, wild-eyed, muttering to myself. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ I looked at her, took a deep breath, ‘My mother’s coming.’ ‘But that’s great!’ ‘No! No, it isn’t! They’ve never seen our house. We have to redecorate the whole thing!’

And so, by god, that’s what we set out to do—all while planning a wedding, writing a novel, working a full-time job, and, oh yeah, moving into a full-blown MS exacerbation and two hours infusion therapy of 1,000 mg IV prednisolone every day for five days. (This is another whole story that I don’t have time to tell here, but imagine scenes of an insane person—me on taper of oral prednisone that made me manic to the point of being certifiable twice a day—bellowing in Home Depot as she lifts a hundred-pound counter on the cart and her sweetie weeping; an insane person [ditto] threatening to drive the car through a flower stall for not.having.the.right.flowers; an insane person firing the person replacing the kitchen floor… )

But eventually our house was repainted, the kitchen cabinets refinished, the kitchen floor replaced, every bits of door and cabinet hardware in the house replaced, the carpets cleaned, and the back garden completely dug up and re-turfed (mania can be useful) and the day before the wedding our guests began to arrive.

Here we have yet another long story—actually several of them—about major thunderstorms and turf floating away, emergency blue tarps, waking friends at seven in the morning for help rolling tables through the mud, my mother meeting Georgia and calling it swamp and then coming to our house for the first time on l to be greeted by our cat with a snake in her mouth, power cuts to the hotel that meant No tea for my mother on the morning of the wedding, one stepbrother’s sudden dramatic refusal to set food in a lesbian household, the two mothers of the bride turning up both wearing red and blue, and a rehearsal dinner involving two double martinis in five minutes and Kelley divorced parents being in the same room as each other since, well, the divorce…

But we’ll save that for another time and skip straight to the wedding. It was a beautiful day, washed clean the night before with everything sparking under a blue sky and smelling fresh. Everyone beautifully dressed—well, okay, one friend wore eyeball earrings and a goth t-shirt—and smiling. Kelley and I in our white dresses that hid all the damage and floating serenely to our place on valium (Kelley) and Taittinger (me). We read our letters. People cried. My mother spoke beautifully about love knitting up the sleeve of ravel’d care. We made our vows. I won’t repeat them in full but the essence was the phrase ‘I will be strong, and brave, and fierce for you. No matter what.’ People cried. And then we toasted and laughed and cried some more. Then half the people got drunk really fast because the mead, though it tasted light, packed a wicked punch. Then the food was ready and we ate and talked and Kelley and I circulated—never letting go of each other that whole time—and at once point I looked around at this sudden community we had made and just swelled with love and pride and thought, We did it. Now everyone knows what this means. And nothing can stop us. No matter what.

And exactly 30 years later here we are. We’ve had some hard times but we never doubted us, the solidity and rightness of us, because we knew clearly what we mean to each other and who we are as individuals and as that third thing, our relationship. It’s that relationship built on 35 years of love and thirty years of community support that has sometimes been brave and strong and fierce when one of us could not. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that getting married doesn’t matter.

I’m not talking about the legalities but the ritual acknowledgement, because nothing about that first wedding was legally binding. Yes, the law—the legal wedding ten years ago, exactly twenty years to the day after the first wedding—the one where we spoke the traditional vows, to have and to hold, to love, honour and cherish, for richer for poorer, for better and for worse, no matter what, is something good and solid to lean on; it’s reassuring. The engraving on our second rings, Big love, feels true. But the key, the kernel, the heart of the matter of both weddings, the mortar between the building blocks of our daily lives, is that binding oath common to both ceremonies: No matter what.

I love Kelley. Kelley loves me. We will be strong and brave and fierce for each other forever, no matter what.