It took three nights of pillow talk before Leah and I decided to drive into San Francisco and get married at City Hall. At first, we felt we'd be wasting energy on yet another symbolic protest. We were already registered in three cities as domestic partners. Once, at a demonstration in front of the IRS, we'd even had a "marriage" ceremony when a minister led thousands of gay men and lesbians through their wedding vows—but that was performance art, a clever way of demanding recognition and benefits. To consider it otherwise would be like getting married with the Moonies.

In our 21 years together, Leah and I have bought two homes. We've intertwined our lives with those of our families during the passage of birthdays, holidays, bar mitzvahs, and funerals. As our ten-year-old niece said, "Aren't Barb and Leah married already?" In truth, the answer was both yes and no.

At City Hall, the ceremony was the first private moment in a long day of waiting. The sudden hush in the marble Beaux-Arts rotunda added a regal air as our witnesses unfurled the chuppah, the cloth canopy used in traditional Jewish weddings. As Leah and I took our places below it, I was amazed to find tears streaming down our faces. What began as politics had turned tender and very personal: We felt ourselves joined with every ancestor who had come before us and stood in this way.

Later, Jane, my sister, telephoned from Denver. Her voice was trembling with emotion. "I'm so happy for you." She put the phone down for a moment, briefly overcome. "Are you going to change your last names?" she resumed. "Are you going to register for gifts? Are you going to send out announcements?"

"Maybe," I said.

"Well," she urged, and I could feel the shutters of her heart spring wide, "you should!"                              ‘

My sister loves Leah and has told her so, but she has never showered us with such excitement. I believe it was the ritual of marriage that caused her to celebrate us in a way she never has before. I know it changed how I communicated our news. (Nobody cried when we signed the domestic-partner agreements.) It was the ritual of marriage that transformed the action of more than 7,000 people from civil disobedience into an act of profound joy.

There is a private moment for every couple when they move across a secret boundary of the heart and join their lives. In that sense, everyone, straight and gay, is "married" before they show up to say their wedding vows. But the essence of ritual is its public nature. Every marriage ceremony is a script that asks the happy couple and their families, the village, the city, the state, to proclaim aloud this fundamental bond.

As time goes by, poll numbers and politics will dominate this story. But poll numbers can never reveal the way a centuries-old rite can suddenly transform a person's feelings. Rituals have a way of undermining abstractions. They tap into our deepest, most instinctive emotions.

And marriage is a ritual everyone understands. When 3,500-plus couples got married recently, the wider net of our families, friends, even strangers, knew exactly what to do. They laughed. They cried. And they sent their heartfelt congratulations.