Last Friday, Dan and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. Saturday marked ten years together, along with Orlando Pride—which is how we keep track of where this whole thing began. Some couples have a restaurant, a song, or an exact timestamp. We have a community-wide celebration with rainbow flags. Subtlety has never been a requirement in Dandyland.
We use Orlando Pride as our anniversary because Dan asked me out at my first one, ten years ago. He asked me to coffee. At the time, I was trying to navigate being openly gay and attending an event that would once have represented everything I was supposed to avoid. Finding my future husband was a fairly ambitious bonus feature.
The Man Who Showed Up That Day
My first Pride was terrifying. That might sound strange to someone whose experience of Pride has always been celebration, but I arrived with a history that didn’t disappear just because I had finally come out. I had spent years in a world where being gay was treated as something to overcome, and I had helped lead an organization built around that belief. Walking into Pride meant being present, publicly, in a life I had once insisted wasn’t right for me—or anyone else.
I wanted to be there, but wanting something and feeling safe enough to enjoy it are two different things. There was a lot for my nervous system to process. Apparently, it had not received the memo that we were allowed to simply have a nice time.
And near the end of that first Pride, Dan asked me out.
I love the simplicity of that now. There was this enormous, complicated history behind me, all these questions about who I was becoming, and then there was a man asking if I wanted to get coffee. I didn’t have to solve the rest of my life before saying yes.
Ten Years Is More Than a Beginning
It would be easy to turn that moment into a tidy story about finding love and having everything fall into place. But we’ve been together ten years. We’ve had plenty of time to discover that falling in love does not come with easy-to-read step-by-step instructions for being married.
We brought our whole selves into this relationship, including the parts we were still getting acquainted with. We’ve grown, and we’re still growing. Loving someone over time means continuing to learn about a person you can sometimes convince yourself you’ve already figured out. It also means allowing yourself to be known when being charming would be considerably more convenient.
Dan’s love has given me room to do that. I don’t always know how to receive it gracefully, but I know what it has meant to be loved while I’m still figuring things out. After so many years of trying to become someone acceptable, there is something deeply moving about building a life with someone who loves me here, in the middle of the unfinished work.
Five years ago, we got married. This past Friday, we celebrated that decision and the life we’ve continued building around it. Saturday, we marked the invitation that started it all.
Why Pride Will Always Be Personal
Orlando Pride belongs to a whole community, and I don’t want to reduce it to the backdrop of our love story. But it will always carry that additional meaning for us. It’s where my first experience of showing up at Pride became connected to the man who would become my husband.
When I think about the version of me who went that first year, I remember he had already lived through so much, and he had no idea what the next ten years would hold. He couldn’t have imagined all of Dandyland, much less planned it. He just had to get himself there and be willing to say yes to coffee.
Writing WHY: A Memoir helped me make sense of the road that brought me to that point. Living with Dan has given me ten more years of a story I’m grateful to be inside.
So, happy fifth wedding anniversary and happy ten years together, Dan. Thank you for asking me out at my first Pride. Of all the things I thought I might have to process that day, a future husband was a particularly lovely surprise.
I’m very glad I said yes.
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