“Topher, take those off the list,” my fiancé Preppy says, tapping the computer screen.“What? I need new shoes,” I protest.
“You can’t put shoes on our wedding registry. It’s trashy. And they’re not even good shoes. Go back to looking at blenders.”
“I already found a blender. What if I get married in the shoes? Someone could buy my wedding day footwear. They’d be in every picture. That’d be really gratifying for the buyer.”
“You can take them off now, or I can do it while you’re asleep, but they’re not staying. New rule: You don’t put anything on this list without us both agreeing to it. You can’t be trusted. You’ll put light bulbs and Clorox on there.”
“Like we don’t need those things? Those would be very practical gifts.”
We’re on the Target Club Wedd website, registering for our gifts. I really thought we didn’t require that much around the house, but once I started looking, I discovered a slew of items we desperately needed. It’s like when the annual Sears Wish Book would arrive in the mail back when I was a kid. I’m enjoying the shit out of this. Any gay person who’s on the fence about supporting the necessity for marriage needs to create a wedding registry. They’ll be on board for equality faster than you can say “Kitchenaid Mixer.”
We’ve been infuriatingly elusive on setting a specific date for our wedding- Preppy’s got a huge work thing that’ll take up most of the summer, then his parents are renewing their vows in September, and I’m up for a role in a play in October… it goes on like that until roughly July of 2012. We have been operating under the assumption that two weeks will magically appear in both of our schedules, and that’ll be our wedding. I have no idea why we thought that would happen. It has never occurred before. Our mutual days off are as rare as unicorn sightings, but we held out hope.
Then Club Wedd asked us for our wedding date, and we had to come up with something or it wouldn’t let us create our wish list. Flush with our desire for a new lawnmower and 600 thread-count sheets, we agreed upon October 17th as our fake date. Funny, that materialism was able to get an answer out of us, after friends and family have been begging for months. My pal Slutty Mandy has been resorting to threats.
I can’t speak for Preppy (even though I do, constantly.) But I know the reason I haven’t been in a huge hurry to set a wedding date is because even though it’ll be the biggest event of my life, when we leave Massachusetts and return to Georgia, nothing will have changed. We’ll have this wacky marriage license that’ll only work in some parts of the country. It’ll be like my Sprint service when I was on tour, fading in and out of range as we drove from state to state. My desire to get married has been overshadowed by the more immediate concern of having that marriage actually mean something wherever we go.
The night we get home from our Cape Cod nuptials will likely be very similar to what we’re doing right now: I’ll prep dinner, he’ll make sweet tea. We’ll watch bad reality television and fold laundry. He’ll do some planning for work and I’ll make him read whatever I’ve been writing. Not exactly Earth-shattering stuff, but it’s the life we want. If flying to another state and getting a piece of paper lets folks know we plan to have a whole lifetime of nights like that, then it’s probably worth making room in our schedules.
“You wanna just go with this October 17th date?” I ask. “It’s as good as any other day.”
“Sure,” he says. “We can do that.”
We both open our planners and cross out two weeks in October. I write “GETTING HITCHED” with a Sharpie. We’ve set a date, thanks to the good people at Target. When we return, we’ll still have about forty miles of bad road toward getting that marriage recognized in our hometown. But our lives will be noticeably different: We will have new sheets, and a lawnmower if anyone’s feeling generous.
And if I play my cards right and ask nicely, I might get some brand-new shoes.
