Our Second Wedding Anniversary

Aaron (my husband) and I were married on this day in 2015. We’ve been together since we met in 2010. To be honest, we’ve lived together as a couple since Autumn of the year that we met. Our wedding wasn’t exactly a spontaneous event as mush as it was merely assumed by both our sets of parents that it would just happen once marriage equality became the “law of the land” here in the USA.

To be perfectly truthful, when we did first discuss getting married, marriage equality wasn’t even legal in all fifty of the states in the U.S. On October 6, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear cases appealing the decision of the U. S. Fourth Circuit Court in allowing marriage equality throughout the entire Fourth Circuit. This refusal automatically legalized marriage for everyone legally residing in the Fourth Circuit: Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, North Carolina and South Carolina. This decision didn’t effect marriage equality bans in almost a dozen other U. S. states.

For a couple of years prior to the U.S. Supreme Court considering the marriage equality issue, Aaron and I had discussed marriage but only in the abstract. It wasn’t legal in Virginia so we’d not made any definite plans. Then, in refusing to consider the case, the Supreme Court handed all same gender loving couples a gift of becoming legitimate. The swiftness of the outcome caught us both, and others, by surprise.

The day after the verdict was announced, Aaron’s parents called him. They were thrilled as this meant we could now become a married couple. My parents contacted us via Skype us later that evening (Aaron’s parents had called them with the news), congratulating us both and wondering when our wedding would take place.

The pressure continued unabated from both sets of parents and our siblings until January, 2015. That’s when we decided to get married and chose Saturday, August 15, as our wedding date. Aaron’s family is Roman Catholic and my family is Greek Orthodox so the religion issue was the next major decision after the date. In order to spare either family any hurt feelings, and the both of us any extra headaches, Aaron and I opted for a civil ceremony presided by a court official.

We were married in a bare ceremony in the garden of a mutual friend’s home. Aaron’s older brother, Jerome, and my identical twin brother, Alex, stood as our “best men.” They were both nude for the vows, also. Alex, like myself, has preferred living without covering for almost all of his life. Jerome was introduced to social nudity by Aaron and me several years ago and has become a regular “nude enthusiast.” The court official who married us wore his official judicial robes. We all think our nakedness made him somewhat uncomfortable. His hands were shaking throughout the entire ceremony and he barely looked any of us in the eyes after the event.

We had to wear clothes to our reception. Some of our guests were professional colleagues and some were friends of our parents. As both families jointly paid for the reception, we felt it was a little extreme to subject all of them to our nudity. Our decision, no one else’s.

We started our life (legally) together, just as we met. Clothes-free!

Naked hugs!

Roger/ReNude Pride