Legally, Finally

The Papers

Today I signed a piece of paper that made something true on paper that has been true for much, much longer. In fact, for me it’s been true in nearly every way, for thirty-four years.

I need you to sit with that number for a second, because I had to. Thirty-four years. Josh and I have loved each other since before either of us could drive. Since before either of us had done any of the living that was going to happen to us — separately, painfully, necessarily — before we found our way back to each other. We didn’t take the direct route. We took the kind of route you’d cut from a novel for being too much: federal prison, other marriages, twenty years of complete silence, a Facebook friend suggestion that undid two decades in one scroll. But today isn’t for that story. Today is just this: an office, a stack of paperwork, and a timid court clerk who had no idea she was standing in the middle of the last chapter of something that started when I was eight years old.

We are, as of today, legally married. Backdated to March 18th — which feels less like a technicality and more like the state finally catching up to something that had been true in every way that actually mattered, for a long, long time.

Common Law

Here’s what nobody tells you about common law marriage until you’re the one holding the pen: it doesn’t create the marriage. It just finally admits to one that’s already been happening. The state doesn’t hand you a certificate and say congratulations, now you’re married. It looks at your life — your years, your shared everything — and says, oh. You two have been married this whole time. We’re just now doing the paperwork.

So today wasn’t a wedding. No dress, no cake, no first dance. It was quieter than that — and it hit harder for it. It was two people who have already lived a whole life, separately and together, walking into an office and saying, in writing, with a stamp to prove it:

I think about the version of me who was eight years old, writing his name in a diary I still have, in handwriting I can barely read now. She had no idea. I wish I could tell her then — all your dreams come true.

The Date

This is the part I can’t write without getting choked up, so if you need a tissue, get one now. I’ll wait.

With common law marriage, you don’t get a future date or a current date — you choose the one that reflects when your marriage actually began. Not when the paperwork was filed. When it was true. And when it came time to choose ours, we didn’t pick an anniversary from our own timeline. Not the day we reconnected, not the day he moved in, not any of the obvious ones.

We picked his grandparents’ wedding anniversary.

I call her Nanny, same as Josh always has. She and my mom were close in that quiet, dependable way certain women are for each other — my dad was her pastor, and somewhere in that, she became my Nanny. She is the kind of woman who has exactly three priorities, in this order: God, her family, her church. And for reasons I don’t fully understand but will never stop being grateful for, she decided a very long time ago that Josh and I belonged together — and then she prayed us there.

For years, through every version of our story where it looked like we were never finding our way back — through his time away, through my other marriages, through twenty years where we didn’t speak at all — she never stopped. She believed it like it was already written and she was simply waiting for the rest of us to arrive at the ending she could already see. As if God himself had whispered it to her before our minds could even comprehend the idea of it. As if He laid it gently in her lap and said, this one needs your faith to grow.

In March, she and Papa celebrate seventy years of marriage.

So when we sat down to choose our date, there was no conversation. There was exactly one date in the world that made sense to build our marriage on top of — the one belonging to the two people who never once stopped believing in ours, even when we’d stopped believing in it ourselves.

Our married-on date is now our shared anniversary. Which means every year, on the same day, we’ll be celebrating alongside them — this coming March, their seventieth, and our first. Two anniversaries. One date.

I don’t fully know how to explain what it feels like to build a marriage on top of someone else’s prayer like that. Like she planted something before either of us was old enough to understand we’d need it, and it just kept growing — quietly, patiently, through every wrong turn we were both determined to take — until one day we walked into an office and made it legal.

Finally, Us

I keep landing on that word. Finally. Not because the love was ever in question — thirty-four years doesn’t leave room for question marks, not even during the twenty of them we spent not speaking. But there is something about finally being on paper, finally having something official attached to a love that has survived more than most marriages will ever be asked to survive, that feels less like an ending and more like proof. Receipts. The divine plan — and one very persistent grandmother — finally getting what she’d been asking for, in writing.

We didn’t need the paper to know we were married. We’ve known that for longer than we’ve understood the magnitude of the commitment at all. But I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t feel like the culmination of every act of love, every act of sacrifice, every pitfall, and every triumph. I’m not going to pretend that it’s not, ultimately, all my dreams come true.

And here’s the last piece of it, the one I almost forgot to mention. I’ve never changed my last name. I used to think that was stubbornness, or maybe just bad luck. Now I think it was obedience I didn’t know I was practicing — holding onto my father’s name because God had only blessed one marriage for me to take a new one for, and it hadn’t happened yet.

— Moe