Recently, I found a drawing from tenth grade, an anime-inspired rendering of someone meant to be the adult me wearing a shredded lace gown and combat boots. COURTESY THE AUTHOR

Like most little girls, I had a fluffy white approximation of a bridal gown that I wore around our house until it lay in tatters. I often begged my tomboy cousin to play groom, a job she bore with sufficient humor. A wedding was, I imagined, an incredible day, better than your birthday, Halloween, and Hanukkah combined, with all eyes on you—a chance to be the star of your own show.

This wedding fever had not been contracted from my mother. Like many feminist women of the eighties, she had married with some hesitation. She wore a sharp suit and spectator pumps to a morning ceremony in the basement of a synagogue. Her opinion of weddings seemed to be much like mine is now on sex in public places: enjoy yourself but get it done fast, and let’s please not get caught. Her wedding photos seemed to me an utter waste of time and resources. She wasn’t even wearing her signature red lipstick. Sometimes, I would take her wedding shoes out of her cedar closet and try them on, hoping to absorb some of their special power.

Eventually, I outgrew my bridal fantasies and moved on to other areas of imaginary play (being the President’s daughter, joining a sorority). But, when I was eleven, my babysitter Noni got engaged, and wedding mania swept our home once more. We spent every day after school flipping through bridal magazines and discussing the details: Sleeves or strapless? Hair up or down? Surf and turf or chicken? My mother would come home to find us deep in wedding plans, drawing up seating charts and designing place cards. This had to be a confusing sight for a woman who had once given me a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of handcuffed suffragettes. My work as junior wedding planner could only have been a disappointing mystery to her.

When Noni walked down the aisle, in a dress encrusted with every shiny doodad in the known universe, her enormous family filled the church with the echoes of their sobs. I cried, too, but for a different reason than I had expected: I was embarrassed. Something about the spectacle of the ceremony—Noni being handed off from father to husband like a doll at a yard sale—struck me as patronizing, outdated, and terrifying.

As a teen-ager, I continued to imagine my wedding, but now it was an alternate version, informed by my newfound status as a self-proclaimed “weird girl.” Recently, I found a drawing from tenth grade, an anime-inspired rendering of someone meant to be the adult me wearing a shredded lace gown and combat boots. Beside the image, I had listed details of the wedding: Tofurky would be served. The White Stripes would play, followed by Sade. My mother would walk me down the aisle. But, despite my self-regarding rejection of tradition, despite the riot grrrl costume, there she was, drawn in my own hand: thin, blond, breasts perky as hell, and veil perched daintily. A bride all the same.

In college, we talked endlessly about the politics of marriage, its mercantile origins, its role as an organizing principle of the patriarchy. A full seminar was devoted to the issue, in fact, with letter grades and all, in which we debated why we should or shouldn’t engage in such an archaic act when our L.G.B.T.Q. friends and family couldn’t. If we got married, weren’t we supporting and promoting a bigoted and outdated institution? Finally, I could sense a certain moral logic behind the queasiness of watching Noni at her wedding, getting shoved toward her husband like a kid being forced into the first day of kindergarten. (It should be noted that I may be the only child who sobbed at the end of “The Little Mermaid” because Ariel had to leave her father.) But my friend Audrey put it best when she raised her hand and told our professor, “I object to the marriage-industrial complex. But I want that dress. So now what?”

“I’m never getting married,” I told my friend Isabel while we floated in the Dead Sea. We were twenty-two and smeared with mud. “It’s a tool to oppress women and eliminate their freedom,” I added. “Plus, who wants to make out in front of their parents?”

She was newly in love, high on connection. “You’ll take that back the minute you meet someone you like,” she said.

Three years ago, when I was twenty-five, I met a bespectacled musician named Jack. He had a passion for John Hughes movies and driving on the Jersey Turnpike. His belief in, and insistence on, true equality for L.G.B.T.Q. citizens was no small reason why I fell in love with him, and, early in our relationship, I watched him struggle with the decision of whether or not to perform at a straight couple’s wedding. He discussed the matter at length with queer friends, concerned that it might be a form of betrayal (ultimately, he was given their blessing, though he seemed fairly tortured about it anyhow). The struggle was real and raw for Jack, and so it somehow became understood, between us, that we wouldn’t even consider marrying until every American had the same right. And I said it proudly whenever I had the chance, with the grandiosity and intimations of sacrifice you hear from certain lesser vegans.

According to a June 30th article in Time, we were not the only ones who felt this way, as straight couples across America eschewed the idea of a celebration that their L.G.B.T.Q. friends and family could not participate in with a shared sense of freedom. While my own queer sibling considers marriage barely radical enough to scratch the surface of their consciousness, many of the couples profiled in Time felt that, without national marriage equality, their weddings would be a flat-out attack on the queer people they love. Jordan Davis, one of the men profiled in the piece, said, “I was boycotting marriage because I have family members who would say we don’t need marriage equality. They thought [the gay-marriage debate] was someone else’s problem, so I was trying to make it their problem, too.” (Full disclosure: Jack and I are also mentioned in the piece, among a slew of public figures who announced that they, too, were waiting—though some, such as Brangelina, jumped ship in favor of good old-fashioned romance, in Château Miraval, France.)

I proudly wore our anti-marriage badge, though I did cut a rug at assorted straight weddings. But sometimes, in a moment of deep gratitude, I would mutter these words to Jack, unbidden: “Marry me.” They became a kind of code, a way of giving a million other kinds of loving thanks. I wasn’t serious, I told myself. It was like when I tell my dog to “get a job.” But I also liked that our anti-marriage plan wasn’t absolute, and that it teased at a brighter future for all (a future where I might get to wear the fluffy white dress).

That future, of course, arrived not long ago, when the Supreme Court ruled that marriage is a right for all, regardless of gender identification or sexual preference. Like so many people around the country, I awoke to dozens of joyful messages from friends and family, rainbows and hearts and a sense that at least one great victory for human rights had been achieved in our lifetimes. What a joy, to have a morning like that, knowing how many people felt affirmed and liberated, knowing that Pride weekend in New York would be an explosion of hope and glitter.

Soon after, another kind of text started to trickle in: “Now you can get married!” “Hello, bride to be