Sad words in today's Boston Globe from GLAAD President Jarret Barrios:
I was one of the first elected officials in the country to marry his same-sex partner. In part because there were so many naysayers, we worked to be a model couple — with each of us trying be the perfect husband. Like other lesbian and gay couples, we hoped to show our relationships for what they are: loving partnerships that deserve the possibility of “happily ever after” that marriage promises.
But as our families continue the march towards equality, the gay and lesbian community often doesn't talk about divorce, even though some of the most important protections associated with marriage are exercised at the end of a relationship — protections that help the more economically vulnerable partner, give a formula for sharing the care of the children, and establish how two people can disentangle a life's worth of acquisitions, compromises, and dreams.
Just as gay and lesbian couples share the joys of marriage, we will share the pain of divorce, something for which we have no template. Divorce plumbs impossible depths of sadness. It involves separating the dishes and the books and all the other things you acquired back when you both still felt the lightness of love, asserting to a judge at a public trial that, yes, your marriage has broken down irretrievably, and telling your parents whose marriage of 47 years hangs heavy over your anemic explanations to them.
Read the rest here. Barrios and his partner were together for 16 years and married for five.
