 I was in traffic in Los Angeles and that's like having coffee with someone in the car next to you. You deal with sitting next to this person over and over again for miles. And I noticed that this person had a yes on eight campaign sticker on their bumper. And I thought, I want to see who this person is. And I pulled up and I looked over and I got a very distinctive what look back. And I said, I just disagree with your bumper sticker. She said, well marriage is not for you people anyway. And I thought, God, do I have a gay flag on my car? Like how does she even know I'm gay? And normally I think I'm pretty good about being able to come back with something to support myself. But I was in shock. And I remember it was a yellow bumper sticker. And it had an image that looked like a parent and a child connected. Because protect the children was a big part of their campaign. But when I think of protecting your children, you protect them from people who are perpetrate crimes against them. You protect yourself from things that can harm you physically, emotionally. And the insinuation that I would be a part of that category. That my getting married to Jeff is going to harm some child somewhere. It's so damning and it's so angry. Because if you put my nieces and nephews on the stand right now, I'd be the cool uncle. And to think that you had to protect someone from me, from Jeff, from our friends and from our community, there's no recovering from that. And unless you've experienced that moment, regardless of how proud you are, you feel ashamed. It rocks your world. I have found someone that I know I can dedicate the rest of my life to. And when you find someone who is not only your best friend, but your best advocate and supporter in life, it's a natural next step for me to want to marry that person. March will be nine years. It's always an awkward situation at the front desk at the hotel. The individual working at the desk will look at us perplexed. You ordered a king-size bed. Is that really what you want? And it was certainly an awkward situation, walking into the bank and asking, saying, my partner and I want to open a joint bank account and hearing, you know, a business account. An LLC or an S corporation? No, not my business partner, my partner. Being able to call him my husband is so definitive. It's something that everyone understands. There's no way to really describe how it feels. I love Jeff more than myself. And being excluded in that way is so incredibly harmful to me. I can't speak as an expert. I can speak as a human being that's lived it. Being gay doesn't make me any less American. It doesn't change my patriotism. It doesn't change the fact that I pay my taxes and I own a home and I want to start a family. Husband is definitive. It's something that everyone understands. There is no subtly to it. It is absolute and it comes with the understanding that your relationship is not temporal. It's not new. It's not something that could fade easily. We would love to have a family, but the timeline for us has always been marriage first because it solidifies the relationship. We gain access to that language that is global where it won't affect our children in the future. They won't have to say, my dad and dad are domestic partners because truth is not everyone knows what a domestic partnership is. We want our children to be protected from any awkwardness like that. We want to focus on raising our kids.