At a standup show last weekend, the comedian opened by asking who in the room was married. I found myself outraged and offended. Why would he ask that at this time and place? Why not ask, say, who in the room has the right to marry, and has availed themselves of that right?

My indignation was an overreaction, but it was fuelled by these past months of the marriage equality debate in Australia. It’s the same indignation that has made it hard to bite my tongue, this spring, when friends said they were going to weddings: who the hell is getting married right now, in this country, I wanted to ask. But I stopped myself, questioning my right to judge their decision; surely they must have their reasons for so very much wanting to undertake this particular ceremony, at this particular time. Right?

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My thinking on the issue started some years ago, when my partner and I were looking after my dad who had dementia. I remember one moment in particular: she was parking the car while I got him admitted to hospital – and when she came to find us, the duty nurse was reluctant to admit her to dad’s room. Then my brother’s wife arrived – and by dint of being able to say she was the wife of dad’s son, she was a shoo-in. Our relationship was eight years in at that point, and we had cared for my mother as she died from cancer – the distinction between long-term partner and “wife” seemed ridiculous. But it also brought home the many ways in which our relationship was treated differently, purely because it was same-sex. If she or I had been able to say “wife”, it would have made a stressful time that little bit less stressful.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dee Jefferson and her fiance, on the morning of the Sydney marriage equality rally.

Four years later, after we finally wrapped up that time in our lives (after many similar dealings with nursing homes, doctors, funeral parlours and lawyers), I proposed to her – a gesture of my commitment to our relationship, with pragmatic considerations underpinning it. The lead-up to the proposal was confusing. I’d never been very interested in marriage: my parents’ ceremony was low key – Mum wore navy and dried her hair out the car window on the way to the church; there were peel-your-own prawns at my grandparents’ place afterwards. Dad was more traditional, Mum was feminist – and I took my cues from her tendency to never talk about marriage in anything other than practical, pragmatic terms.

So I felt like an imposter, and I was sometimes confused about why I was doing this thing that felt so alien. But afterwards, I remember the difference it made to our families’ perception of our relationship, and I remember the euphoria it brought to our relationship after nine years of really tough times. I realised how complex my relationship with the idea of “marriage” was.

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These past months, as the same-sex marriage debate finally kicked off in earnest, have been emotional. I’ve cried watching comedies. I’ve felt sick going on Facebook or opening my news apps – and I’ve been mad as hell, too. I’ve been scared holding hands with my girlfriend in public. I’ve been braver and talked to cab drivers about their vote in the “postal survey”. I’ve doubted my fitness to parent after reading a pseudo-scientific article by a homophobic academic – and then been ashamed to tell my friends that I’m so feeble-minded.

I’ve doubted my right to marry my partner, and I’ve certainly doubted my desire. Fourteen years into our relationship I’m convinced we’ll grow old together – I’m just not sure I want us to be “wives”. Sometimes I feel like that choice – to marry or not to marry – has been reduced to a football match: more about winning than the quality of the game. The more homophobic bile was spewed by talking heads, the more hateful the street poster campaigns, the more I wanted to slap a goddamn veil on my head; but at times, it also made me want to swear off heteronormativity altogether.

As I write this, my partner and I are both leaning towards a very simple registry service – and a bloody big party. Our desire to marry is partly for pragmatic reasons, partly for legal reasons, partly for the principle – but it all amounts to the same thing: that our committed partnership be given the same weight, in fact and in perception, as any committed partnership between two consenting adult heterosexuals. I do think Australian people should decide who should be able to get married – not the church, or John Howard, or a generations of mostly male, mostly heterosexual politicians living in eras past.

The sad fact is that, as many marriage equality advocates predicted, the debate has been as much a debate about homosexuality as it has been about marriage. The hardest part has been realising how much homophobia and hate actually exists, at all levels of Australian society; how “other” I am. At its best it’s drawn my friends and allies closer (there was something incredible about watching my partner experience “queer community” en masse at the marriage equality rally – and burst into tears); but at its worst, it’s alienated me further from my “detractors” – a schism that Trump’s America has proven is toxic.

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If same-sex marriage is passed by the government, I’ll be happy I have the same rights as my straight friends – but I’ll never take my equality for granted again. I am closer than I have ever been before to imagining how it feels to be an Indigenous person, or someone from an ethnic minority living in a country whose constitution affords the federal government the power to make laws for “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”; a country whose government didn’t recognise its oldest inhabitants as citizens until 1967 (after a referendum), and even then didn’t deem them fit parents – and refused, until 2008, to apologise. A country that still has no official memorial for the Indigenous men, women and children killed in the frontier wars, presided over by a government that chooses to leave hundreds of refugees living in inhumane conditions where they seem likely to die if no one intervenes.

My biggest hope for this time in Australian history, at which we have put the rights of non-heterosexual citizens on the table, is that it makes us more cognisant of the rights of all minorities – and makes us fight for them with a similar fury.

• Dee Jefferson is national arts editor at Time Out Australia

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