Gay marriage has directly impacted my life. Or, rather, the lack of gay marriage has directly impacted my life. My opinion of, and positions on, sexual orientation have been entirely determined by my life experiences. My case for gay marriage isn’t one of justice, or politics, or even progressive values. My case is one simply of compassion and personal opinion. But that’s enough for me.

Growing up, I knew no one who was gay. My experience of “gay” was limited to a childhood visit to Provincetown with my family when we were vacationing down the Cape. When I saw men walking hand-in-hand down the street, I didn’t understand what it was, and thought it a little creepy. To my parents’ credit, they simply told me that they “were gay” and that was that – no value judgment.

Fast forwarding a couple decades, the first gay person I ever knew who was out was a friend a few years behind me at UVA. And he did not fit the stereotype still in my head from my fuzzy childhood memories of that single Provincetown visit. He was an introverted techie who liked guns and was a member of the NRA. Finding out he was gay was a well-needed shock to my personal mindset. He and his boyfriend started dating not long after I started dating my wife, and we would all have a blast going out together.

A few years later, my wife and I were living in New York, and a neighbor in the building opened my mind even further. My friend there was out, proud and – to be frank – a little bit intimidating to my still-sheltered mindset on the question of sexual orientation. Thanks to the patience of this man, who took the time to befriend me and talk to me in spite of what I realize today was tactless ignorance in some of the things I said and did, I learned that, no, not all gay men wanted to date me. In fact, I was just plain unattractive to the majority of them, just like women. This friend, too, was soon in a long-term relationship. And those of us living in that building would all go out and have a great time with some frequency. When we moved to Virginia, my friends from New York came to visit us and enjoyed the hospitality of our back deck.By January 1, 2011, all of these gay friends of mine had broken up with their long-term boyfriends. To be frank, this kinda made me angry.

No one can know what goes on inside of another person’s relationship with their significant other. But at least in a heterosexual relationship throughout America, there’s a pattern that it can be assumed serves as the baseline: Dating, Engagement, Marriage. That pattern serves all couples as a framework for having hard conversations about kids, moving in together, and mutual expectations about “where a relationship is going.” The end-game expectation for the vast majority of people is marriage, and that expectation creates a context for having difficult conversations sooner rather than later, and ensuring that couples are on the same page about relationship direction, if not content at any given time.

My friends were denied that expectation. Though they may have individually harbored the expectation of marriage some day in the future, that expectation was personal and not the assumption of the society in which they lived. Their relationships were not afforded the same socially-sanctioned framework of emotional progression that is helpful in catalyzing critically important, if difficult, conversations between two people in love.

I make no judgements as to fault or blame in the dissolution of my friends’ long-term relationships. Every relationship is its own universe, for no one else to truly understand. Indeed, there is likely no fault or blame to be found. But I do judge a society which does not provide the same level of emotional support and expectations for their relationships as for mine. I find myself asking if my friends would have been in these relationships as long as they were if the expectation of engagement and marriage were assumed by all around them? Would they have gotten years of their lives back, years they could have had with another person who might have been walking a path of emotional development more similar to their own?

I don’t know.

But I do know that I don’t care if gay marriage is the Right Thing To Do as much as I care that recognizing the importance of marriage among any two adults in love helps those two adults develop that relationship. The recognition of a marriage is about compassion for me. It’s the recognition that these two people have picked each other, through thick and through thin, and that as their friends it’s our job to help them see themselves and each other through things.

It’s about commitment, and respecting commitment with legal, socially-sanctioned authority. It’s about making staying together the assumption, instead of the exception.

Needless to say, I pray that in my lifetime the blight upon our commonwealth constitution that was enacted in 2007 will be erased, and I aim to help make it so.

{Update} – Sen. Don McEachin has introduced a bill in the Assembly to prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. We should all support him in this affort.