My partner Sally and I made the decision to get married in May of 1983 after living together for half a year and talking through how we wanted to define what we both knew (pretty early on in our cohabitation) was going to be a life-long partnership between us. Initially, the primary discussion was whether to subject our relationship to the conventions of marriage, and all the patriarchal assumptions that might go with those conventions. Having resolved that, whether to have children was also part of those initial discussions, but at the point of our decision to marry we had only agreed that we were not precluding raising a family and would continue to discuss that option in our path forward. Finding “a mother for my future children” was not one of my motivations!

At the time of our decision to marry I was 27 and she was 34. We were both feminist activists who had committed most of our waking hours the previous couple years to the goals and efforts of the National Organization for Women, which at the time was focused on ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and protecting women’s reproductive rights. It was that shared commitment to feminist values that was one of the key bonds between us, along with a profound sense of ease around each other. Continue reading →