One hell of a year

My vows for our second wedding on our first anniversary

Our first wedding Photo: Holly Shankland photography

Laurie, last year, when we were doing all this from our backyard, you started your vows with a live tweet. So this year, I have scheduled the full text of my vows to publish online as I’m speaking to you now.

I will not be outdone at my own wedding two years in a row.

Two weddings!

When you get married, people like to wink-wink-nudge-nudge you and ask how married life is going, and until today I’ve had to tell them “Well, we were living together beforehand, and we’re still planning a wedding…”

So maybe everyone should just ask me again tomorrow.

I’m kidding, of course. For all that’s familiar about our life, being married has been full of new adventures. Adventures like filing joint tax returns… and filing name changes. Just a lot of filing, really.

I’m not kidding, however, about publishing my vows. And while I’d like to pretend I was joking about that being an act of competition, we both know that’s not the case.

You learned about my competitive side early in our relationship when a truly egregious pun you made about the herb thyme escalated into an all-out battle to see who could come up with the worst play on the word.

We went back and forth for hours making jokes about the passing of thyme, thyme flying, and quality thyme together. I’d wait, until we were just about to fall asleep, to tell you what a great thyme I’d had that day. You’d curse me out and let me think I won, only to tell me it was thyme to wake up the next morning.

That was one of the first moments I knew I was falling in love with you, and now I’m here in front of our family and friends to renew my promise to continue loving you…for all thyme.

You’ve known about and loved my ambition from the beginning, and I have loved having a partner who appreciates me for who I am and keeps me on my toes.

Our entire time together — and from now on, let’s just assume I’m using the right homonym — you have challenged the way I see the world. Not just by coming up with more and more heinous puns for me to match, but through your natural curiosity and love of sharing what you learn.

You notice architectural details in restaurants and wonder what the building was used for before overpriced brunch. We drive down a road with an unusual name and you look up the person after whom it was named. You see property markers in an empty field and speculate exactly where and how the new owner will build their house.

On our morning dog walks, you wonder aloud why the moon shows up where it does so frequently, I’m sure you’ll be summarizing some famous astronomer’s biography for me any day now.

It turns out the world is full of questions to wonder at that I’ve never even thought to ask.

This is one of the many ways we are so seemingly different.

You care about things that completely escape my notice. You love to question everything and reason out why things are the way they are, and I am just a vibe.

You order pain au chocolat even when the café calls it a chocolate croissantbecause those are different things, I now understand … vaguely. I order the pink donut because I usually like the flavor of pink things.

After our backyard pandemic wedding, you watched the Zoom recording, doing longitudinal studies of people’s reactions to our vows. I was just excited to have so many photos of the dog in a tux.

Our best man, Guff at our first wedding Photo: Holly Shankland Photography

We are so different, but we are also natural complements. Since getting diagnosed with ADHD, I’ve come to appreciate you you as not only my best friend but also my executive function.

In exchange, I’ve done my very best not to ruin your last name, to create a beautiful home for us, and to provide a steady supply of Johntent for you to mine for social media.

Actually, that line in your vows, “the horrifying ordeal of being known — get used to it” was something I said to you one morning as we hiked, making the type of jokes at each others’ expense you can only make when you care enough to really understand one another.

In those moments, when we’re laughing together, we make a certain intuitive sense in a world without nearly enough of it.

Here we stand, two men celebrating a relationship grounded in kindness and equity despite us both nearly not making it out of boyhood for a lack of both.

We both made decisions to live when too many young queer people in similar circumstances did not. And now we’re here, celebrating a relationship that wouldn’t have been imaginable to either of us then—in legality or quality.

We are two anomalies made steady and strong by the decision we made to live and the decision we’ve made to love each other to our fullest abilities.

And throughout our lives, we’ve collected around us a constellation of anomalies. People with whom we have decided to grab moments in time out of which we’ve made lasting relationships.

It seems so natural that we should all be here today, but those decisions did not always come naturally. The ordeal of being known can, in fact, be horrifying and hard to get used to.

To love, you have to accept loss. Always. And we’ve endured loss. Separately and together. Most recently in saying goodbye to Guff, around whom some of our earliest sense of “family” formed.

And you know that time will come when you adopt a dog. The way you know that statistics put even odds on your marriage, and you know time and biology conspire against all of the relationships you value.

Relationships are a bit like tattoos—another way in which we are different, so trust me on this one. A certain amnesia descends in between each that makes it easier to embark on the next. But we know it’s going to hurt.

Why do we do it?

That’s a heavy question for a wedding, right? “Thanks for coming to my party. Instead of a renewal vows, I’ve written a sermon on loss.”

I hope you all bear with me. We got married the first time in a pandemic, and here we are a year later, getting married in a pandemic and a war.

The decision to live, and love, and grab a little bit of happiness for yourself seems harder than ever. Yet here we all are today, celebrating two people and a moment in time. Why are we here today?

Maya Angelou said that we, as human beings, at our best, can only create opportunities.

That’s a Fiona Apple joke for anyone who’s not as obsessed as I am. But really, I think that’s all there is to it.

In a world where so little makes sense, things are so unfair, and so much seems outside of our control, all we can do is seize these small, ephemeral opportunities to celebrate and strengthen the connections we’ve already risked so much on.

And like a tattoo, when the pain subsides—if you take good care—you’re left with something beautiful and lasting.

These connections, these wondrous anomalies we call our family, make us steady. They help us bear the heavy questions without falling under their weight.

And that makes the decision to open yourself to love — and all that comes with it — just a little bit easier.

It makes all this make sense. You, with all your questions, make my world make sense.

The champagne toast at our first weddingPhoto: Holly Shankland Photography