Little Big Decisions ˖⁺‧₊⟡

a major life update ☼ building a future with my partner mijael ☼ queer thoughts on marriage and the art of sharing a life

Oct 31, 2024

How do you write about something (or someone) that is of monumental importance to you, your experience of life over the past few years and the hope with which you look towards the future, laced with starlight in your eyes like a kid fresh off the school year, ripe into summer?

I have been saving this letter in an attempt to answer that question, to stumble upon some outline or story that might express the excitement that sits at the root of my soul whenever I think about this. I tried to come up with a few introductory statements, the kinds of sentences that start a novel and make you shiver with presence. Life is… Love is… But I have never been skilled at conjuring clear hypotheses. The only thing I am naturally good at is having a lot of them, and questioning the ones that we were taught to believe.

The hypothesis most proposed by humankind is that romance is our golden purpose. That every Romeo needs his Juliet and every Juliet needs to sift through a thousand Romeos until she finds the right one. That until we find, or are ourselves found, we know only a slice of the life that exists, because True Love is a different thing, an ephemeral and magical beast that requires the right place and time, what some often call “fate.”

Like most queer people, I was neither Romeo nor Juliet, and I learned to feel as though I was fated into something wrong. Even though I believed in the golden purpose as a child, falling in love with love through books and films, the media of the 90’s and 2000’s included no characters that I could play, so I refashioned its shape into the vehicles of friendship, family and self-realization—things I could actually relate to. Romance, for me, was at first impossible and then secondary. I thought that I had to fall in love with a woman until I did not, at which point I had already redefined what falling in love meant (with friends, with family, with the process of becoming), and I did not think about falling in love at all.

Until, one day, I did, sitting with myself in the shared TV room of an apartment I moved into in Mexico City, which is, as “fate” might have it, when I met my partner. The rest of my housemates were out, or in their rooms, and it was the first rainy day of the season. I thought to myself, as I finished watching a Christmas movie: I think I am ready to fall in love. I realized that I had never wanted to before, that in all of my previous relationships, I was somewhere else, in my own world, focused on other things. At that point, though, I felt ready, attuned.

I opened the Tinder app and messaged an assortment of people I matched with, knowing too well that I would forget about the conversions and return to the app a year later, as I always did. Except this time I didn’t. I matched with a handsome man who looked like an actor in a Spanish show I binge-watched over the pandemic (Élite) and we talked, unable to meet due to travel and COVID, for the next three months. His tattoos and chiseled face made me swipe right. His thoughtful, playful, excited responses to my (what one might say overly eager) ability to share personal details and random parts of my daily life made me excited to message a stranger.

The funny thing about our relationship is that it has taught me more about free will than it has about fate. As a child, I used to think about love in the format of the golden hypothesis: that it was something that happened to us, a miracle that befell the most-deserving in a season of good fortune. Thinking along these lines—that life is a story that occurs on the outside, as opposed to a series of choices we are intrinsic to—is, perhaps, the thing we get wrong the most often. We assume the separation of reality and responsibility with almost everything: love, happiness, success, health. That these are things we get, have or receive, as opposed to co-create through a string of everyday choices. Being in a relationship with Mijael over the past three years has taught me how to co-create—a life, a relationship, a community—and allow myself to grow in the process of creation. It has taught me that a relationship is not built by a magical meeting of two people, Romeo and Juliet. Rather, it is built through the art of showing up in our everyday lives and making little decisions.

Here is one of ours: WE ARE GETTING MARRIED!

Those four words form a phrase neither of us expected to say. Marriage is something that Mijael and I used to talk about the way my generation talks about going to church (hard pass). The institution always seemed a bit old-fashioned to us, an inflated custom that descended from things we were never included in in the first place (the church, social order, gender roles). Until we realized, of course, that making this decision would not only represent building a future together, but enable it. If and when we want to move to the United States (or elsewhere), marriage is a strategic union that enables a path to citizenship. As we thought about marriage through this lens—minus the flowers and ring and mortgage required for a wedding—it all made sense: the union will make it easier for us to continue building a life together, wherever life takes us.

After finding our way to the phrase—we are getting married…we are getting married!—excitement followed like sun after rain. At first, we thought: Let’s do it now! And then we realized that marriage, like all of life’s big events, presents a choice: even though this is a decision between us, it also means something to other people. Which means that it can be something between us and the people that we love. If there is anything I have learned over the past twenty nine years, it is that the biggest opportunity we have in this life is not to do, become, or achieve, rather, it is to expand the ways in which we share life with each other.

First we told our parents, and then our close friends. We decided to plan the legal ceremony for when both of our families are in town (conveniently, we had already planned to host them in the city for Thanksgiving). We thought: we can do the marriage at the courthouse! And then we thought: well, we will want to celebrate after, so maybe we can invite our closest friends to a bar! And then the excitement kicked into mania and I created a seven page Google Doc outlining all of the things we could plan, distinguishing what we are now calling “the little wedding” (taking place over Thanksgiving weekend) and “the big wedding” (to take place in four or five years).

After Mijael had enough time to cope with the fact that he is marrying an aquarius princess—a master of transforming something small into something not-so-small-anymore—the excitement, for me, tumbled into a turn, and I found myself stuck in a bubble of anxiety. The assumptions of the golden hypothesis made me wonder if we were ready for marriage, as if taking this step was supposed to appear somewhere in a series of life events that coincided with self completion. Both of us are still building our careers. I am still looking for a therapist that accepts my health insurance. Neither of us are millionaires. Mijael still has trouble describing what I do for work. I thought: Are we the people we need to be to get married? What if we are premature, like undeveloped infants leaping out of the womb? What if people leave our little wedding and call it cute, modest, thrifty, because we are doing it so unconventionally, pragmatically fast?

I went for a walk with my close friend Claudia and she popped me out of the bubble. She asked me why I wanted to get married, to think about what it meant to us, as opposed to what it meant to society. The answer was immediate: I am excited to grow with Mijael. I am excited for the both of us to continue creating a life together, outside of Mexico or inside of Mexico or anywhere in the world. I am excited for us to move somewhere new and do something scary. I am excited about the nature through which we formed this decision, through a series of conversations where we laughed and questioned and smiled aloud, without expectation or worry, knowing—at the foundation of us—that whatever we’d decide would be right, for it would be a decision made together.

I think that is why I am writing this: It’s like, We are getting married!, but those words mean something different to me than the way the movies or books portray them. It is not about doing it, not about proving our love or becoming husbands after boyfriends or portraying ourselves as a unit to the external world. It is not about reaching a milestone or a graduation on the relational clock. It is something more innate to what I understand love to be, something simple like watching a bud unfurl to a blossom: Here is a person that I love. Here we are together, sharing a life, building new ideas as to what it (life) looks like, knowing each other deeper and wholler every day. Here we are tripping over one another, holding one another, shouting at each other with the faith and courage to be better, brighter or just as we are.

When I think about us, I see light. Black, white, blue, red, yellow, purple, green. I see two people furnishing the interiors of their lives with real wealth, doubts made convictions and insecurities made strengths in conversation, the bright orange feeling of belonging to any place or point in time, because wherever we are, we will have each other. I see dreams that scare and chapters that forsake that bend to the confidence we hold in each other. I see laughter. I see awe. I see hope. I see mistakes, cracks in the ground that give way to stems and branches. I see flowers.

Marriage makes sense to me now. Legally and spiritually. And I realize that this is probably what marriage has meant the entire time, without the fuss of religion or gender, and that this is what my married friends went through themselves. Marriage is another little, big decision in building a life together. A wedding is a celebration of that life.

Last weekend, Mijael and I remixed the tradition of the proposal by planning “proposal days” for one another. I took Mijael on a scavenger hunt around the city, stopping at a Japanese onsen and a Mexican beer festival, “popping the question” with a pair of matching tattoos. Mijael took me to my favorite park in Mexico, decorating the lush grass with an indulgent picnic and a letter he wrote to ask for my hand in marriage. As he read the letter aloud, I started to cry.

I thought: Here is a person that created something in my true language, English and the written word. Every line he spoke sparked a world in my mind and a memory in my heart, brought up beautiful things I had stored in my brain and perspectives I often forget when lost in the flurry of everyday life. Here is a person that has been by my side for the past three years, who has walked me through grief and held me through angst, who has let me hold their hand and carry their weight when they needed the same in return.

What people do not tell you about love is that it helps you believe in yourself, in ways we all should believe in ourselves already, but those ways are made difficult by life, its trials and traumas and natural currents to doubt. The phrase “you have made me a better person” is trite, yet telling, because that is what people do. We inspire each other.

To this day, I still do not believe in soulmates. I do not think that any two people are destined to be together, but in the end, that is what it feels like, isn’t it? That we found each other. That some mythical force orchestrated our paths to cross like comets in the sky. What I do believe is that in this life, we have limited decisions. We have limited time, energy, and resources. No matter how abundant and limitless life might be, it means a monumental amount that one person chooses to dedicate their limits to another. That two people choose to expand their limits together.

All of this is a long way of saying that I feel like the most excited person on the planet, marrying Mijael. He is the best person that I know. Whenever I heard other people say these words, I’d think: How cliché, you must not know that many people. But I think I get it now. It is not about one person standing out from the rest, nor possessing exclusive qualities that others lack. It is not about our appearances, personalities, habits or talents. It is about the light that shines inside of us when we spend enough time cherishing another, and when another person teaches us to cherish ourselves.

Knowing Mijael inspires me to know myself, to know my friends and the strangers on the street, to know my family, to know the world. The love I feel for him is sometimes indescribable (hence: 2371 words to say “we’re getting married!”). It envelops the world that I know and expands what it can look like. It reminds me of what it feels like to be a child and makes me excited to grow old. Most of all, though, it makes me eager to be here, living in this cup of life, happy to soak up every ounce of feeling it has to offer. ☷