I'm sitting in an airport with my sleepy wife of just a few weeks right now, waiting for our red eye.

When I was younger and all through my adult life, I never much cared for the institute of marriage. In American culture, so many forms of the ceremony carry either overt messages or echoes of misogyny or homophobia, and with over half the population getting divorced, it isn't even sacred by the numbers in a secular sense.

None of this is to say I was against the institution (nowadays you can craft it to your liking), -I just wasn't for it on any level. It was never a dream of mine. I always figured I'd probably get married one day because the statistical likelihood of finding a girl who was as disinterested in the institution as I was was fairly small.

Turns out I was right.

So after being together four years we were married. It involved some compromises on my part (atheist with a gay sister getting married in a church). But all those compromises were easy to make. Being with someone you care about that much for that long teaches you things. I learned that I don't need to make an ideological stand on her happiness. She knows me and she knows who I am, and I her. That makes compromise truly possible and easier to do than it ever has been before.

I was not prepared for the sense of accomplishment I felt, as I do not look at marriage as an accomplishment, -just a meaningful promise to each other where the real accomplishment is what precipitated the vows. Much to my surprise, in the days afterwards I felt like I had achieved something great. Like I had beaten Bowser. I honestly am still passively wrapping g my head around this one. I've never once felt the slightest bit that marriage equated to any sort of life milestone, -not even an insignificant one. Right now my running theory is that I'm simply not immune to a lifetime of cultural messaging, and because marriage is viewed as an accomplishment in our society, I feel accomplished. I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like for many women.

Anyway, it has more significance to me in the direct aftermath than I would have imagined, in a few different ways. Too many to list on an iPhone in an airport. Mostly things are exactly as they were before we were married. The difference is not tidal, but rather subtle and varied. There is something to formally promising things to one another in the crucible of a ceremony.