It was striking, on that street alone, how many people had gay members of their family and were willing to say this to a stranger. It was also striking how many of them respected and valued the institution of marriage overall.

Some people respected it so much that they did not consider themselves yet worthy. "I need to save up a little money," said a tall, polite man who answered the door in his stocking feet; he supported gay marriage and wanted to marry his girlfriend, but felt too broke to ask her.

"Right now, I'm just working on my student loans," said another. Asked if he felt financial stability was a pre-requisite for marriage, he said, "Absolutely."

Perhaps most affected were the canvassers themselves: men and women who joined the effort, sometimes as paid staffers, usually as volunteers. Many were straight. Some were married, but many were not. Some were feminists who felt skeptical about marriage as a historically unequal union but found themselves growing more sympathetic, more appreciative of marriage and its virtues. Some were armchair Marxists who went through a similar philosophical evolution. Some were just young activists who wanted to get involved in a fun communal project and had not given a lot of thought to the topic at hand. "I don't really care about marriage," one guy had whispered as he was being trained to phone bank. Some skateboarded to their assignments; some shared cigarettes with the voters they were canvassing. But as a result of all the talking, their own thinking changed to the point where one canvasser confessed to a household of voters that he was planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him. Later, when the tape of that interaction was played during a training session, he sheepishly confirmed it was true.

"I think that we have had a profound impact. We changed a significant portion of our voter base on this issue," said Maria, a thoughtful, soft-spoken thirtysomething who was one of the star canvassers of the campaign. "We were talking about really personal, private details about marriage and relationships, and family, about religion and faith. Every area of a person's life is impacted by marriage--if they are married. And if they are not married, there's impact there, too."

During her months of canvassing, and supervising other canvassers, Maria got very, very good at talking to strangers about marriage. First she tried talking to them about their own marriages, but as she went along she refined this, also talking to people about their parents' marriages or friends' marriages or really any marriage they had experienced. Because everyone has experienced marriage--or even its absence--in some way. She talked to people who had been in toxic and abusive marriages, and to people whose marriages had been the mainstays and central comfort of their lives. She talked on the phone with a woman dying in hospice. The woman wanted to tell her how she and her family always opened one present on Christmas Eve, in honor of the fact that it was the date she and her husband had married. She talked to men who described their love for their wives in a way, she suspected, they rarely confessed to the women in question. Sometimes people would stand at the door in the Maine summer, talking about the qualities they loved in their wife, or their husband."You would see the spouse peeking and laughing at the stories they were sharing. People were saying these beautiful heartfelt things that maybe they didn't say to each other."