Marry Me, Mary!

One day in the near future, I will marry Mary. We've been together for 4 years now. I love her and she loves me; we're a good match and consider ourselves very lucky to have found each other.

Mary wants to marry me, but given that I was married once before, I'm admittedly afraid of going for it again and failing for a second time. So, I'm dragging my feet a bit. Thankfully, Mary is a patient woman and pretty understanding.

It will happen some time soon; it will! It's just that I'm not quite yet in the position to give her what she wants and deserves. But besides the financing of a ring and a wedding, there's some emotional baggage I'm working on releasing so that I can move forward without reservations. I don't expect to get rid of it all, but I'm close to letting go of a little bit more, which will help me be the best version of me I can be.

Mary and I came together unexpectedly and during a time when I was supposed to close out my chapter in New England. I was living in Rhode Island at the time and she was in Boston. It was March and Winter was turning into Spring, which in retrospect was symbolically appropriate given where each of us was back then. It was just supposed to be a date or two, but it quickly turned into several more, but I was in denial and kept thinking we were just a fling. After all, I was moving back to New York for good that Summer; so, we weren't supposed to be a thing.

We talked about it a lot and were both clear that come summertime, I'd be gone, but since we were having such a good time together we pressed on with the idea that we'd milk it for as long as we could. And in spite of my resistance, we fell hard for each other. It was hard to end something that felt so good and so right, which is why we decided to give long-distance a try. Neither of us were fans of such an arrangement, but we were new to each other and just trying to figure out if and how we could work out.

Mary and I are very different in many ways; we are in an intercultural and intergenerational partnership. And it just so happens that before she showed up, I'd decided I wouldn't be in a serious relationship with another white woman again given my experience with white women up until then. I was trying to avoid repeating the same patterns again and given everything going on socio-politically, I didn't want to experience so much of what I had been going through with white people who willfully dismissed me and my sensitivity to the bigotry that was on the rise under 45.

You see, I'd mostly been in serious relationships with white women and, at the time, I was working in a school where the leaders were predominantly white women too. With the growing call to do the necessary anti-racist work to fight systemic racism, I was eager and ready to confront and dismantle the white supremacy that infiltrated all my spaces. Disappointingly, the white queer women in my life whom I loved and worked with were the most resistant in recognizing how their own white privilege and white fragility got in the way of our collective progress. They would do and say things without realizing how much their words and actions deeply hurt me and even when I explained it to them, they invalidated my perspectives.

I was left utterly distraught upon realizing that many in my circles didn't have my back like I'd anticipated, but those experiences pushed me to reflect more critically on my entire journey and forced me to question my alignment to white people and white women in particular. White women had been the ones who'd most hurt me and while I did not and could not disconnect from them entirely, I now knew better than to get serious and attached to white women as it had proved to be a very dangerous affair. So, when the love of my life came packaged in whiteness, I was admittedly quite frightened.

Then there's the fact that Mary is 14 years my junior, which in my mind isn't an issue if we're just going out and having fun, but getting serious with someone much younger was a whole different story. Don't get me wrong, I believe that age is nothing but a number too when it comes to consenting adults, but when you're a feminist and grew up seeing the dynamics at play between older men and younger women, you want to steer clear of anything similar.

I didn't know of any real life examples of intergenerational queer relationships, but beyond the media portrayals, I'd also seen plenty of my macho uncles and cousins dating women entirely too young for them and I wasn't a fan. I was hyper aware of the judgement around it. Although I'm not a man, I'm a masculine presenting person and it did not feel good to know that I had something in common with them. I didn't want to feel this way, but I did and it kept me from jumping all in.

Thankfully, from the very start Mary didn't care about any of that. Instead, she seemed to like that I'm older and not born in the USA and even appreciated how vocal I could be about my lived experiences and what it means to be me in America today. She reassures me every time one of these fears comes up for me and let's me know she stands by me no matter what; something nobody else has ever done.

For as young and White as Mary is, she gets me in ways nobody ever has before and that matters so much more than age or race or some other superficial human descriptor. She's kind and loving and brilliant. The truth is she's an old soul and our connection feels beyond our control; it feels fated. The fact that we met was highly improbable and all the "happy coincidences" we've encountered along the way lend themselves well to my wanting to stay. Now it's just a matter of me getting out of my own way.