Yummy, Yummy, Yummy

"I've got love in my tummy."

The lyrics are repulsive, I know, the song idiotic, but doesn't it make a cute headline and lead? (No?) In any case, I do have an inner glow of late.

It's from a kind of flow I've been feeling in the last week since all the ceremony and celebration. My coworker Darah put it nicely: "Being married just feels different, doesn't it?"

Yes, it does.

It's not just the ring sitting eternally on your finger. It's not all the people fawning over you when they find out. It's just something that vibrates while you're sitting together with your spouse at home, or looking at him/her across a restaurant table. It's an intangible thing: It's marriage.

I'm not being sucky or saccharine about this.

I'm realizing that if a right's denied to you, you never really experience it. Being able to marry the person I love has opened a whole world of human experience that I'm just starting to sense, something most people take for granted and have shared for a lifetime.

Which I guess is a good way to explain why the right to marry is so important. A domestic partnership is a legal arrangement, a privilege doled out by the state like your driver's license, but marriage is a condition that completes us as human beings. It fosters so many good human qualities and I suspect it provides this flow I feel. It's much pleasanter than routine, and it makes routine even more endurable.

Wait. Maybe this is sucky and saccharine.

I don't care. It's really nice. It's a very nice feeling of inclusion, both internal and external, that I've never felt before.

I'm sure it wears off after a while, this inner glow, this flow; but the marriage stays. And so does he.