{"id":131950,"date":"2012-09-28T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-09-28T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=131950"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:03:36","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:03:36","slug":"changing-love-gay-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/09\/28\/changing-love-gay-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Love In The Time Of Gay Marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> And Baby Makes Five: Modern Love In The Era Of Gay Marriage<\/a> by Julie Weiner in Vanity Fair.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> I first met Martin\u2019s ex-boyfriend at a tuxedo shop on lower Fifth Avenue. I had known Martin had been living with Ted six months before we starting dating. Through his and Martin\u2019s shared DVD collection, I had known Ted\u2019s affinity for French New Wave and the Weekend at Bernie\u2019s series; through Martin\u2019s closet, Ted\u2019s old Yale sweatshirts; through Martin\u2019s maritime trinkets and hand-selected seashells, I had learned of Ted\u2019s family\u2019s cottage on Martha\u2019s Vineyard.<\/p>\n

But before that blustery October day, when I introduced myself to Ted and greeted him with a hug, I had never known of Ted\u2019s easy warmth, unreserved kindness, and sleepy, autumnal smell. I walked into the tuxedo shop the day before my wedding to Martin for a last-minute alteration. What I ended up altering was all three of our lives.<\/p>\n

I invited Ted home to the prewar town house that Martin and I had recently purchased on King Street, in a liminal, industrial area between SoHo and the West Village.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cMartin?\u201d I called, walking in.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes? I\u2019m in the solarium!\u201d he called.<\/p>\n

Ted and I, holding hands, walked down a hallway and through several rooms to get there.<\/p>\n

\u201cTed, oh my God, what are you doing here?\u201d Martin asked, putting down his copy of The Recognitions.<\/p>\n

\u201cTed, please,\u201d I interrupted. \u201cLet me.\u201d I kissed Ted gently on his outer ear in a way that straight people would dislike.<\/p>\n

\u201cMartin, I know you and I were supposed to get gay-married tomorrow. But I think that Ted should get gay-married to both of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin stared back at me. I looked down at our recently refurbished floor crafted from imported Brazilian wood.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know I love Ted,\u201d Martin said slowly. \u201cBut Ted is married! Married to a Republican congresswoman with whom he has six Christian children! We can\u2019t gay-marry Ted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ted shuffled his feet. \u201cNow that I can gay-marry you two, what good is my family? I was looking for a means of escape from my traditional, responsibility-filled, missionary-position-during-sex-filled life, and this joint gay wedding tomorrow is just the ticket.\u201d<\/p>\n

All three of us embraced.<\/p>\n

We embraced through the wedding\u2014a tasteful affair at Blue Hill, just north of the city\u2014through the honeymoon to Positano, and through Ted\u2019s daughter\u2019s eighth-grade graduation, which we crashed for purposes of distributing homosexual literature to prepubescent children. But by the following October, we were practically living in different newly constructed wings of our town house.<\/p>\n

Then, Martin brought home George.<\/p>\n

Clutching a bag of groceries from E.A.T., Martin entered the wine cellar, which Ted and I had raided with plans to sell alcohol to minors in exchange for acts of sodomy. With all the money we had saved through our tax benefits as a married triple, we had plenty of expendable income for drugs, wine, cigarettes, and Bill Maher books, but we couldn\u2019t buy youthful flesh. (This was back before President Obama passed his landmark adolescent-homosexual-prostitution legislation, ObamaBare.)<\/p>\n

\u201cLovers,\u201d Martin said. \u201cThere\u2019s someone I want you to meet. This is George.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our eyes fluttered up, to the left, to the right, and finally downward, where we saw George, a cinnamon-colored border collie with penetrating eyes and a hypnotic energy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi, um, sit! Please,\u201d Ted said. \u201cNo, oh! God! Not like that. Not a command. I mean, would you like a chair?\u201d<\/p>\n

George stood motionless\u2014his placidity a mirror onto which all three of our very souls were reflected, deconstructed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must marry this dog, immediately,\u201d said Ted, hopped up on Lambrusco and the legality of consecrating such a union.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve already called the Century Club!\u201d Martin said. \u201cThanks to this gay-marry app on my iPhone, it only took two minutes to meet George, fall in love with him, and book the venue and kick out a previously scheduled wake for a distinguished conservative thinker!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201ciGay!\u201d I said. \u201cI downloaded that, too, and married this baby on the way over here. I completely forgot to tell you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMazel tov!\u201d Ted said, slapping me on the back in a gay way. \u201cTell me about him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHer, actually,\u201d I said. \u201cAnd she\u2019s Mexican, so this marriage is providing her with a green card.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, lucky day!\u201d Martin said. \u201cI can think of just the manufacturing job for her!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWoof!\u201d barked George.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s summer now, and the five of us\u2014Martin, Ted, George, and the Mexican baby whose name I didn\u2019t bother getting before marrying her and still don\u2019t care to learn\u2014have such an obscene amount of money from tax breaks that we\u2019ve spent all summer on sabbatical from our creative-industry jobs. The sex has become tedious, but the replacement sensation\u2014a puddle of fur, navel piercings, love, and formula\u2014has reached a boring, blissful equilibrium. Free time bleeds into free time that bleeds over\u2014our capacity for pleasure now a hemorrhaging wound.<\/p>\n

To amuse ourselves, we like to play a game wherein one of us pretends to be sick and we all visit each other in the hospital. Is it sanitary for a dog to enter a hospital? It doesn\u2019t matter, is the way we like to look at it\u2014it\u2019s unconstitutional for a dog not to visit its bisexual-Mexican-baby spouse in a hospital. We are only shackled by our lack of rules. Looking back, the before seems an eternity of pleasure from the immediate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: And Baby Makes Five: Modern Love In The Era Of Gay Marriage by Julie Weiner in Vanity Fair. The Text: I first met Martin\u2019s ex-boyfriend at a tuxedo shop on lower Fifth Avenue. I had known Martin had been living with Ted six months before we starting dating. Through his and Martin\u2019s shared […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nLove In The Time Of Gay Marriage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How gay marriages raise the bar for what could be considered a boorish affair.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/09\/28\/changing-love-gay-marriage\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Love In The Time Of Gay Marriage\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How gay marriages raise the bar for what could be considered a boorish affair.\" \/>\n<meta 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