A Marriage Form Will Just Be Icing On Our Cake

So the piece of paper the Alameda County clerk is going to hand us on that summer morning really isn't worth much in terms of legal rights. Those are taken care of already. The clerk has no way to register an opinion about how much we love each other, what our families think, whether we have joint bank accounts or why I go to work and Ellen stays home with the children. This new summer marriage will only make us more married in one small way. There will be a piece of paper, a government form that says "marriage," and it will have space for both our names. The form the county is getting ready for this summer doesn't have spots for "bride" and "groom." You have to fill in "Party A" and "Party B." It's pretty graceless terminology. I don't care. That terminology was made with me in mind.

I've spent my whole life watching forms catch up with me. My white father was raised in the segregated South, in Alabama. He married my mother, who is Japanese American, in 1965. It wasn't until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws against interracial marriage. Though the legality of their marriage was never challenged, he did tell me that when he took my mother to Alabama to meet his family, he realized that they could never live comfortably in the South as an interracial couple. They settled in California.

When I was growing up, I'd have to fill out forms at school or the doctor's office that asked for my race. We could check only one box. I was never sure what to do. Sometimes I ignored the instructions and checked more than one. Sometimes I'd check "other," but that seemed to be kind of like checking "nothing." It was as if the person I was, both white and Japanese American, was outside the world of bureaucratic paperwork. Whatever I was, the person in the government office who would be filing my form couldn't even imagine me and didn't think I was worth extra space on federally issued ink and paper.

As I got older, sometime in the late 1980s, I started to see a change. For the census in 2000, the first time I filled out the questionnaire as an adult living on my own, I could finally check more than one race for the federal government. There were enough mixed-race people in the country that the form-writers and bureaucrats figured they'd better make space for us, too.

For the last 12 years, I've had a whole new form dilemma. When the form asks for my marital status, I'm back to not being sure what to check. It trips me up every time I go to a new doctor, or have some human resources form to fill out at work or apply for a mortgage. What I check depends on the situation I'm in. If the form has some kind of legal meaning, I check "single" even though I know that it's cutting Ellen out of the picture. If I check "married," which I sometimes do, I'm afraid that it will be misinterpreted to mean that I am married to a man with all of the federal benefits and responsibilities that go along with it.

So to me, the form the clerk will fill out will be the truly significant thing about our summer wedding. It's not just a piece of paper. It's a piece of paper that means the law in the state of California is catching up to me, just as those forms that asked about race finally started catching up to me around the time I was a teenager. I was always mixed race. Ellen and I have been married for more than a decade. We're just getting the random bored clerk in the county office to agree with us. This summer, I will fill out a new form that's just now catching up with who we've been all along.

There's a joke about what we'll do next month that I've heard too many times already. It's not very funny because the subtext isn't funny. It goes like this: What's the difference between gay marriage and straight marriage? With gay marriage, you have to get married over and over again to the same person. There are a lot of couples who are in the same position that Ellen and I find ourselves in. We had a religious ceremony and a domestic partnership. We got married in 2004, when San Francisco's City Hall was open to us for just a few weeks. We're a little tired of getting married. We want this time, at the office of the Alameda County clerk, to be the last.

My first marital spat with Ellen might be over who gets to be "Party A" and who has to be "Party B."

Sara Sarasohn is an arts editor at NPR News.