Just days after Shawn Davis and Richard Sawyers were married in September 2011, they started planning to have kids. “You started asking fast,” Davis said recently, looking over at his husband. “Was it even on the honeymoon?”

“I think it was,” Sawyers replied, recalling their time in Venice following their wedding. We were sitting on the couch of their home in Washington, D.C.’s Brightwood neighborhood, near the border of Maryland, which they bought last year. Their two-year-old son, Levi, whom they adopted at birth, was napping upstairs.

The two had talked about parenthood for years before their honeymoon. They had even taken a workshop for LGBT couples that laid out the different paths to becoming same-sex parents: private adoption, public foster care adoption, surrogacy. But for Sawyers, the traditional order of operations still mattered. “It was important to be married and to be a family unit—I wanted that to happen first,” he said.

The same was true for the Wesoleks, another couple I met on the steps of the Supreme Court in June, on the day that gay marriage became legal nationwide. “Other people do it in different orders, but for us it was get married, buy a house, have a baby,” Danielle Wesolek told me. She and her wife, Amy Wesolek, moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, got two Boston Terriers, and then had their daughter, Lena, who’s now 18 months old.

Amy and Danielle Wesolek with their daughter Lena, outside the Supreme Court on the day of the marriage equality ruling. Suzy Khimm

The landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges now paves the way for other same-sex couples to follow their lead. Most states permit only married couples or unmarried individuals to adopt, and some have laws that give married couples preference in the process. And if prospective parents want to hire a surrogate to carry their child, many states similarly require that they be hitched.