For Those Who Would

Today brings the news that Connecticut will wed our kind. We don't know that they're given to outbursts of any kind in Connecticut. Our general impression has been that Connecticut is where New Yorkers go to avoid outbursts. But there will be many private, subdued expressions of mitigated, muted joy among Connecticutians who can finally and fatally bind themselves to someone else through better, through health, through richer, to have and to hold until wandering eye they do part. Good on them.

It's a minor salve to a major wound inflicted in California, Arizona and Florida. But if we're honest, from the confines of the good chair, it doesn't directly affect us anymore than Charmin's appearance on Russian market shelves did. We are not, as they say, "husband material". We are to marriage what those infuriating lookie-loos are to Bergdorf Goodman. We look like we might take something home, but we generally don't.

Not for lack of trying. In fact, it's the trying that has proved so trying that we no longer Bergdorf for a Good Man. We J.C. Penney for the low-hanging, quickly-passing fruit. We eat the part we want and throw the peel away - once a year or so. Our relationship disasters are Item #1 on Things That Make Us Laugh in that old gang of mine. The tragi-comic serial failures of our attempts at lasting union are the stuff of bad novels.

There's the one who wasn't really that gay.
The one who already had a keeper, though this was kept a secret.
The one who punched when he got drunk.
The one who kissed us goodbye - for good - in a hospital.
The one who admitted that he'd only been on a virgin hunt. Mission accomplished. And goodbye.

So we have no dog in the Gay marriage hunt - regardless of the state. It's a little like being banned from NASCAR races. We hope to never attend one. But it would piss us off to be told we couldn't. So we sympathize with those who really, really want to tie the(mselves in a) knot. And on some level we're a little jealous of those who have a partner at the precipice of wedded bliss(ful ignorance). We don't. We most likely would. But we don't.

So we cheer and cry for those who can and those who can't. Mostly, though, we cast our lot with the other bunch...

The ones who would.