Matching Flannels and a Melting Wedding Cake: Reflections on a Decade of Marriage

When I was working as a Palliative Care Chaplain, serving mostly in a COVID ICU during the worst of the pandemic, I sat with dozens of people in their final days. What I heard, again and again, was the same quiet confession, the kind that only comes when there is nothing left to perform: I wish I had spent the money on that trip. I wish I had been less committed to saving for a future I never got to live. I wish I spent more time with them.

These were not people who had failed at life by any unit of measure. They had successful careers and devoted families and decades of careful, diligent saving. And still, at the end, what they grieved most was not the work left undone, but the living they had deferred. The trips postponed until the body gave out. The irresponsible, unrepeatable, gloriously unnecessary things they had talked themselves out of in the name of responsibility.

Brittany and I had already been married for several years by then, and still I sat with those patients and felt something shift in me, a clarifying of something I had known loosely but not yet lived fully. That life is fleeting. That tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us, regardless of how carefully we plan for it. That the privilege of health and ability and simply being here is exactly that: a privilege, not a promise, and one that asks to be honored by the way we use it.

The pandemic changed the world in a thousand ways. For me, what remained was a bone-deep gratitude that I had found my person so young, and a renewed seriousness about choosing to live — to travel, to experience, to be present with each other — while we still have the grace to do so. This past year, with so much of what we love feeling threatened and fragile in ways that would have seemed unimaginable not long ago, that urgency has only grown. The fleeting nature of this life, of this health, of this particular political moment we are living through, has been reconfirmed in ways I did not ask for.

But the duality of all of this, the joy held alongside the grief, the gratitude tangled up with fear, has always been present in our marriage. It has been there from the very beginning, even if didn’t quite have words for it yet.

Before there was a marriage, there was a crumbling old Southern mansion in Richmond, Kentucky, the kind of house that had probably been something sixty or seventy years before it started literally falling apart around whoever was unlucky enough to rent it. Brittany and I became roommates there during our junior year of college, in the community house of an evangelical campus ministry we were both involved with. One of my roommates had gotten married in January 2015, leaving an empty room and a gap in the rent, and Brittany, transferring from a small liberal arts college and needing a place to land, was the obvious solution. We had never met. She was involved with the same ministry, she could pay the $200 a month, and that was good enough for me.

The way Brittany tells the story, she transferred schools that semester trying to outrun a girl she had a crush on, as if putting physical distance between herself and her feelings might also resolve something deeper, might make her into a different kind of person in a new town. She also says that the first day I walked into the house to meet her was the day she realized it wasn’t going to work.

I remember that first meeting too. She was sitting on the floor of our roommate’s room, strikingly pretty, long straight dark brown hair, wearing her signature Chacos and shorts and t-shirt, and I knew within a few minutes that I had a new crush to obsess over. What made this considerably more complicated was the architecture of the house itself. To reach my bedroom, I had to walk through hers. Our rooms were separated by a curtain. For $200 a month, you can only ask for so much.

There is a joke in lesbian culture about the U-Haul, the one about how quickly queer women move in together, how fast the feelings become furniture and shared leases and a life rearranged around another person. Brittany and I would like to state, for the record, that we skipped that phase entirely. We were already living together when we fell in love. We went straight from strangers to roommates to quietly, devastatingly attached without ever having to rent a single moving truck. We have always been efficient like that.

Over the next year, our friendship deepened slowly and honestly while we both, completely unknown to the other, were quietly reckoning with our own sexuality in the buckle of the Bible Belt, surrounded by an evangelical community that offered us belonging and community and also, implicitly, a very clear picture of who we were not supposed to be.

That October, we finally said it out loud. Admitted to each other what we had been carrying separately, in the dark, for longer than either of us wanted to acknowledge. We were terrified, for all the obvious reasons and probably a hundred more; the messiness of falling for your roommate, the reality of coming out in the South, the fact that we had both already made plans to move across the country in just one more semester. And at risk of making this sound like a Nicolas Spark’s plot line, it should be made clear that this confession took place under the glow of the Golden Arches, also know as the McDonald’s parking lot. In hindsight, there was no reasonable argument for starting something at this point in our lives. And still, we did.

I can only believe that something larger than us knew something we didn’t. Because we forged ahead, staying up late with the college puppy I had impulsively adopted a few months earlier, who divided his time democratically between our beds, ducking the curtain between our rooms in the middle of the night. It was the kind of love that only exists in that particular season of life, when you are young and unburdened enough to let it be exactly what it is. Late-night Taco Bell runs. Homework replaced by hours of talking about nothing and everything. An innocence that didn’t yet know how complicated and beautiful and hard and worth-it life was going to become.

Those months of loving each other quietly, in secret, in the middle of everything we were each already carrying, are difficult to describe even now. It was joyous and terrifying and serious and silly, all at once, in that way that only the truest things manage to be. We played Secret Lovers by Atlantic Starr on repeat in those days. And it only just now occurred to me that we probably aren’t the only freshly in love twenty-something’s to have done so.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I became convinced, certain, with the particular clarity that comes before you have enough experience to doubt yourself, that I was going to spend the rest of my life with her.

So, on the day we started dating I began writing her a letter every single day, with the intention of presenting them all to her when I proposed. I had envisioned years of this, journals stacked on journals, a record of ordinary love in daily installments. As it turned out, I lasted six months before I couldn’t wait any longer.

By the time I proposed, and by some grace of timing we had each independently planned our proposals for the same weekend, which tells you everything you need to know about us.

We had come out to our closest friends and families by that point. They were perhaps less surprised by our queerness than I would have preferred. It turns out I had not been as subtle as I thought. They were, however, surprised by the relationship itself, and understandably wary of how fast it had moved. Everyone in our lives, with great love and genuine concern, encouraged us to wait before getting married, advocating for a long engagement.

So we did what twenty-two-year-olds do when the people who love them most offer them perfectly reasonable advice: ignore it.

A few weeks after the engagement, we got our marriage license at the Madison County Courthouse in Richmond, Kentucky, just one county over from Rowan County, where, only months later, county clerk Kim Davis would make international news for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

We didn’t know any of that was coming. We didn’t realize that our love and this marriage certificate wouldn’t have been possible just a year earlier. We just knew we wanted to be married, and so we drove to the courthouse in our own county, stood in line, and got our license like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for us, it was.

There is something I find quietly extraordinary about that proximity now, though. That we were just one county over, walking through a courthouse just like that one, signing those papers in a part of the country that would become a symbol of exactly how contested our right to do so still was. We were twenty-two and in love and we had no idea. And dear God, I am so glad we didn’t.

We got married soon after. In secret.

And then didn’t tell anyone for five years.

In our defense: we knew what we knew. We were simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.

The most remarkable part of this whole arrangement is that Brittany’s twin sister kept the secret for five full years, through the public wedding we eventually held for our family and friends, through all of it, not a word. So, if you need someone to keep a secret, Becca has been fully vetted and approved.

On June 11th, 2016, we stood in matching flannels on one of our favorite lookouts in the Red River Gorge, sweating in the thick humidity that only a Kentucky summer can bring, as our college professor, Ramey, married us with the trees and the ridge lines as our witnesses. While another college professor, Molly stood beside her, holding a homemade wedding cake while the icing slowly surrendered to the heat. Becca stood with us, quietly loving us as we began our lives together.

That night, we rented a room in an Airbnb in Cincinnati (as much as our combined college savings accounts could provide) and danced slowly to Gregory Alan Isakov across the hardwood floors in the golden light of our first night as a married couple. It would have been perfect, except the man who owned the house was mixing beats in his DJ studio in the very next room over, did not get the memo about the romantic night we had planned.

We slept softly that night anyway.

In the morning we awoke lying next to each other in the soft morning light, rainbow sunbeams reaching us through the centuries old stained glass windows. It was blissful and lovely and poetic.

And then as we made coffee and planned for the day, we slowly read the news about the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

Forty-nine people, beautiful, beloved people who had gone to a club in Orlando, Florida to simply be themselves in a space that was supposed to be theirs, had been shot dead in the night. I lay in that bed in Cincinnati and could not shake the weight of what it meant, the particular duality of what it means to be queer and alive in this country.

At the very hour we had danced together for the first time as wives, gunshots rang out across another dance floor. At the very moment we had claimed our right to love each other out loud, forty-nine people were killed for doing the same thing.

Ten years of marriage later, I still carry that morning with me. I think I always will, and I think that is right.

To be queer is to hold joy and grief in the same hands, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in the same breath. It is to celebrate love in full knowledge that there are people in the world and increasingly, people in power, who would prefer that love did not exist. The world we are living in right now reminds us of this with a regularity that is exhausting and frightening and that makes me hold on tighter, not looser.

And still: we have been gifted a decade of this love together.

When I sat with those patients in the ICU, what they were mourning was not the grand gestures they had missed. It was the accumulation of living, the trips taken, the meals lingered over, the ordinary Tuesday evenings that you only recognize as sacred in retrospect. And when I look back at the decade Brittany and I have already lived, I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of it.

We have moved across the country together (three times), building a life in places we had never been before we decided to call them home.

We have wandered through countries and cities we had only ever dreamed about, collecting the kind of memories that don’t fit neatly into photographs; the meals we stumbled into, the wrong turns that became the best parts, the questionable places that should have been the end of us, the particular feeling of being somewhere entirely new with the one person who makes everywhere feel like home.

We have stood beside each other in sobriety, through the hard early days and through every quiet anniversary since, and I have watched her become more fully herself in ways that have made me love her more than I thought I was capable of at the beginning.

We have sat in graduation ceremonies and celebrated the degrees that cost us years of late nights and sacrifice and more cups of coffee than anyone should reasonably consume.

We have navigated job changes and career pivots and the particular courage it takes to keep becoming someone new while staying rooted in who you already are together.

We have held each other through surgeries and recoveries and the specific vulnerability of being a body that needs tending, of trusting someone else to be there when you cannot quite take care of yourself.

We have created a little family, made up of the oddest collection of dogs, each one teaching us about patience and love and what it means to be fully and authentically yourself. And now we are in the midst of growing this little pack of ours, waiting, with hope that feels almost too large to hold.

I could not have known, at twenty-two, sweating in those ridiculous matching flannels on a ridge in Kentucky, how much living was waiting for us on the other side of that moment.

I did not know about the hard years or the beautiful ones or the ones that were both at once in ways that are impossible to untangle. I did not know how many versions of ourselves we would each become, or how Brittany would manage to become my favorite person over and over again across all of them.

What I did know, what I have known since that day we finally said it out loud, is that I wanted to do all of it with her.

Ten years. A decade. And I am so grateful, above almost everything else in my life, that I found her so young. That we were impulsive and didn’t know enough to question ourselves. That the same dog still sleeps between us each night, believing this is how it was always intended to be. That we have had all this time. That the life we have already lived together is so full it could hold several ordinary lifetimes, and that there is still, somehow, so much more ahead.

What I have learned from these last ten years, and from every patient who sat with me in their final days and told me what they wished they had done differently, it is that love is not the grand gesture or the perfect moment. It is the accumulation of all the small ones. It is the curtain instead of a wall and the melting wedding cake and dancing anyway, even when the world is breaking outside the door.

I have made exactly two impulsive decisions in my life: adopting that college puppy, and marrying Brittany. They are, without question, the two best things I have ever done.

So, while I will continue to be the person who builds color-coded spreadsheets for every trip we take, who painstakingly labors over every decision until it has been examined from every possible angle, who has stashed first aid kits in every car and cabinet for the just-in-cases — I have learned, in the years since that hot and humid Kentucky summer day, that the very best things in my life arrived not from careful planning or anxious anticipation, but from throwing caution aside entirely. I have spent ten years being grateful that I did.

Love, it turns out, is the one thing worth being irresponsible about.

Some of our favorite memories from the past ten years, includes 26 National Park visits, seven countries, and 37 states (we think). Six apartments and a house spread across three different states. Countless breakfast bagels, an impressive amount of pizza, and enough gratitude to fill the ocean.