The proposition

Quite a few people have asked me and Heather who proposed to whom. It didn't really work like that. The decision to get married was more a process that happened over a couple of months.

At first, I didn't even think of going to Canada to get married. The idea just didn’t occur to me. I was thinking more along the lines of a commitment ceremony here in Australia. But when I raised the idea of commitment ceremonies with Heather, (i.e., I said ‘maybe – not now – but maybe one day in the future we could …’) she was very resistant. She said that they generally seemed pretty ‘hokey’, and she didn’t see the point of them.

‘They aren’t legally binding,’ she said. ‘So why bother?’

I could see her point. But at the same time, it was important to me. I liked the idea of the ritual, and what it meant. Heather came to see that it was really important to me. And she decided that she liked the idea as well.

We'd been planning to visit America at the end of 2005, to visit Heather's family and friends. Heather is American, from Florida, and she has family there and in Massachusetts. Civil unions between same-sex couples are legal in some US states, but you have to be a resident of that state to legally marry. Florida is not one of those states, and I'm an Australian resident anyway, so there was no hope of us having any kind of official union in the US.

We tossed around the idea of having a commitment ceremony when we visited. One of Heather's friends is a Unitarian Universalist minister in Florida, and she was really excited when she found out we were planning a union. She offered to officiate and arrange everything for us. We really liked that idea. But I worried that I would feel strange about the whole process, because my friends and family would be unlikely to attend due to the cost. I imagined I might feel quite sad, and that was the last thing I wanted on my wedding, or commitment, day.

One day, it finally struck me.

'Heather,' I said. 'Do you think we could make a little trip to Toronto when we're in Boston? Would it be very complicated?'

She looked at me. 'You wanna go get married in Toronto?'

'Yeah, I think so.'

'Okay, let's do that.'

And so, we decided. This way, we won't have to worry about one or the other of us feeling sad because our family isn't present. Instead, we will have a little ceremony in Toronto, attended by just a few of Heather's Canadian friends, and a series of parties to celebrate afterwards. We will have wedding parties in Boston, Florida, and Brisbane, so no-one will miss out. And we make the fun last even longer, across two continents and three countries! I can't wait.