12 frogs

We joked that history is made by those with perseverance, with the determination to stay awake.

Lisa and I — and more than 250 other couples — went to City Hall in Cambridge in last night, in order to file our intent to marry as soon as we could.

Who showed up to file? I saw two men who must’ve been in their seventies, and had been together 49 years. Couple number 260 looked to be in their twenties, and one of them was visibly pregnant. Some couples brought their kids, and I saw children from tiny babies to teenagers. Lots of thirty-something and forty-something folks. Feisty women in their fifties. Every kind of couple you can imagine, from just old enough to get married to comfortably retirement age, every kind of couple in love, was there.

In Massachusetts, you need to get a blood test, file your intent to marry (your marriage license application) and then wait three days. You can go to court for a waiver of the three days, and that means the first legal same-sex weddings are going to take place in less than an hour.

It is hard to describe what it feels like, to know that soon, we’ll be standing in City Hall and be pronounced legally married. It won’t change our commitment to each other — we had a wedding nearly three years ago, officiated by an American Catholic priest and attended by family and friends, so we’ve already made that commitment in our hearts — yet at the same time, it will bring enormous changes.

Because we will be legal. Now we’ll have the state goverment recognize what we and everyone in our lives has seen about us for so long now: we are next of kin, we are family.