Same-Sex Marriage: How It Never Hurt Anyone

15 years on: Study on marriage equality evolution between younger & older generations

By:Abigail Ocobock*/Special for The Rainbow Times

This May marks the 15-year anniversary of Massachusetts making same-sex marriage legal—the first state in the U.S. to do so. Since then, over a million people have married someone of the same sex. A record 4.5 percent of Americans now identify as LGBTQ, according to Gallup, with the biggest increases in LGBTQ identification found among millennials. Many millennials, and even more of Gen Z, came of age and entered their first relationships with legal marriage always as an option. They can’t remember, or sometimes even imagine, anything different.

What impact has access to legal marriage had on LGBQ relationships? That’s what I wanted to find out, as I interviewed 120 of the country’s same-sex marriage trailblazers in Massachusetts. I write only of LGBQ people here because unfortunately no trans people took part. Research on their experiences is still sorely lacking.

The people I spoke to credited marriage with the power to shape everything from the minutia of who paid the rent or whether or not they stormed out of the house after an argument, to bigger relationship decisions like how they conceptualized and dealt with infidelity, and if and how to have children. The power of marriage also extended far beyond their private, couple relationships. They felt its impact in public, too, changing how they interacted with heterosexual strangers and participated in local LGBQ communities.

It was in the differences between older and younger LGBQ people that I most clearly saw how much marriage has changed things. The young people with whom I spoke often seemed to be speaking a different language than their older counterparts. While older LGBQ people marveled at how they had “never expected to be able to legally marry in their lifetimes,” many younger people took their ability to marry for granted—so much so that it was often difficult for them to articulate why they wanted to do it. “It’s just what you do when you love someone,” they repeatedly said. They espoused cultural tropes like “first comes love, then comes marriage” and “if he loves me then he’ll put a ring on it,” that could have been plucked out of any heterosexual romantic comedy. They also expected their marriage proposals to have a cinematic romance to them, viewing elaborately planned proposals as a sign of their partner’s