I have just received a letter confirming that I am now married. It arrived while my husband and I were travelling on a holiday, which sort of made that trip our second—or third, depending on what you count—honeymoon. It all feels a bit anticlimactic; there was no big ceremony, we didn’t get to invite all our friends and relations, we just filled in a form requesting that our civil partnership be commuted to marriage and handed it in at the registry office.
Things have changed a lot during my lifetime. When we first made a commitment to each other in 1982 we would not have believed that one day we would be married officially. Not to mention that being gay was illegal during the first twelve years of my life. We said we don’t need an official sanction for our relationship, but that may have been making virtue out of necessity rather than anything.
Acceptance was not easy during the early eighties, and old attitudes still linger on; the struggle for equal marriage has been very tortuous. When the law for civil partnerships was debated in the parliament, some MP’s used extremely demeaning and provocative language. For me there was no doubt that the civil partnership was meant as an inferior sort of union and not as a real step towards equality. I had to do some research for an appropriate verb to use in connection of civil partnership. Even that shows how awkward the whole idea was: I always used to say we ‘got married’ until now when we really are married.
That was perhaps the main reason that I was not immediately ready to take that step, though I have to admit that when my partner and I did enter a civil partnership, it simplified our life together. We didn’t need to explain anything when we were officially hitched. Still there was never really any doubt in my mind that what we really wanted was to be married. Period. No half baked civil partnership, but there seemed to no chance of that happening in Finland.
No political coalition government wanted to take on the issue, and when a number of MPs floored an initiative, it was buried in a committee. When a citizen’s initiative for marriage equality was put forward, I signed to support it, though I was rather skeptical on its possibility of being passed—no citizen’s initiative had done that to date—but it came to vote and passed to law.
Before the law came to force a new citizen’s initiative to overturn marriage equality was put forward and taken to vote. It was overturned and the equal marriage was kept in force. The most important lesson from that vote in my mind is how strongly the present government supports equality: of the cabinet ministers only three voted in parliament for marriage equality. The rest, including Prime Minister Sipilä, voted against.
Though I am glad that I can now say my husband and I are married, it took us over thirty years to accomplish something that has been a matter of course for most people. And if you ask what is our wedding anniversary, it is the date of our commitment in 1982.
