We’d been discussing marriage off and on for a couple of years now, but I was always hesitant. I’ve been an observer of many marriages, good and not, and somewhere in my late teens I promised myself that I wouldn’t marry until I was well into my twenties (or later) and that I would only marry after knowing the other person for several years. (I still think those are good guidelines.)

Sometime last fall, I started to think about it seriously. We certainly knew each other well enough, having seen each other through the death of a parent and a cross-country move. In late November, I slipped and called him “my husband” in a colloquium talk. But I still wasn’t ready to cross the border.

Then I broke my ankle in February, and during the morphine babbling I was telling all the emergency room personnel that I loved them. During some five-minute spell when they were all out of the room, I looked over at Mister Boyfriend and realized how glad I was that he was there and — more importantly— that he was the person I needed there, not my parents and not my best friend. Him. I said, “I’m feeling a lot different about the marriage thing now,” and he said, “When you can walk down the aisle, we’ll do it.” And then we didn’t talk about it again for more than a month. I think he thought it was the morphine talking, especially since I’d been so reluctant before. Finally one night I said, “You know, I wasn’t so stoned that I don’t remember what I said about marriage.” And so we agreed to marry.

We didn’t make any preparations then because we were too busy with the semester. In late May I started to plan a semi-traditional church wedding, and then freaked out. Mister Boyfriend was cool enough to be patient with that, and to realize that my issues weren’t at all about our relationship. About a month later I was coming back from the bank and thought, “I want to go look at wedding rings,” and so I did. And then things slowly got done from there.

It was just the two of us, two witnesses, and an interfaith minister. The bride wore a silk periwinkle dress and sequined princess shoes, and the groom wore a white silk shirt and jeans. The ceremony very much celebrated what had happened before; really, we got married somewhere in the moments between when he lifted me up off of the ice and that glance in the emergency room.