By JOHN KOBLINJUNE 27, 2014  So, what happens to a marriage over the course of 10 years? Make that a gay marriage.  On May 23, 2004, The New York Times printed 41 wedding announcements that included 5 same-sex couples, the first legal gay marriages to appear in these pages. (It began publishing same-sex “celebrations” two years earlier.)  Earlier that week, Massachusetts had become the first state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia do so now and on Wednesday, a federal appeals court struck down Utah’s same-sex marriage ban.  So, where are those first five couples now? Three live in Massachusetts, one moved from Boston to Washington, D.C., and one is in Brooklyn. They have a total of five children, with three born in wedlock. The men and women involved are now 41 to 58 years old. Four couples are still together, one isn’t.  And how did a marriage license change their lives? Some couples talked about how it made everyday headaches like tax and insurance forms go away. One said their lives didn’t change at all. And two couples said they ended up being transformed in ways they had not expected.  “I wasn’t necessarily, like, the bride type of lesbian,” said Mary Beth Caschetta, 47, who married Meryl Cohn, 52, at their home in Provincetown, Mass. “But our marriage has been such a stabilizing force in my life — in both of our lives, really — in a way I could never have imagined.”  Deborah Gar Reichman, Shelley Curnow  After their first child was born, Deborah Gar Reichman and Shelley Curnow were determined to balance being parents with their busy social lives. Art openings? Definitely. Dinners? Sure.  “We were just bringing the car seat into the restaurant,” Ms. Reichman said. “We were totally doing that.”  And then, in 2011, the second child came, and goodbye to all that. Hours spent at tapas restaurants were forfeited. Uploading videos of their children on YouTube became their new extracurricular sport.  “It’s a totally different story now,” she said. “There’s something about two kids that makes you into good parents.”  Ms. Reichman, 41, and Ms. Curnow, 44, have lived in the same 950-square-foot apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, since 2001. (They have a good deal, too. When they moved in, the rent was $1,800. It’s now $2,500.) Ms. Reichman produces TV promos and Ms. Curnow is a systems developer. They started dating in the late 1990s and got engaged on the dance floor of a TriBeCa nightclub in 2002. (“It was a huge plastic ring, almost like a ring pop,” Ms. Reichman said.)  They didn’t set out to make history when they set the date for their wedding in the Berkshires a full year ahead of time. In fact, on a save-the-date invitation, they drew up a timeline of relationship milestones (their first date, adopting a dog), and joked that their marriage would finally be legal in 2024. Turns out, their wedding date fell on the first weekend that same-sex marriage was legal in Massachusetts. It was a happy coincidence, even if they hadn’t intended to get that certificate.  Media reports at the time had mischaracterized them as New Yorkers crossing state borders to making a political statement. It wasn’t about that.  “It was all about standing under a huppah,” Ms. Reichman said. “We wanted our families to come together and to be really legitimate in their eyes.”  Either way, the wedding was a rager, and after that, “we were the couple of the family.” And then they became a couple of parents. Their two children, 6-year-old Felix and 2-year-old Elinore, rule their lives.  On a recent night off, the couple saw the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots.”  “A year later!” Ms. Reichman said, laughing. “A year after it got the Tony. We used to be the people who would have seen it already.”  Or take their 10th anniversary celebration last month at a Spanish restaurant in the East Village.  “Oh, my God, we had the best time,” Ms. Reichman said. “We did the tasting menu and a wine pairing, and we got so drunk and just looked at each other and said: We just never do this anymore. This is so sad. So, we’ve decided to do this once a month.”  Ten years after they became among the first gay couples in the country to legally marry, what’s most remarkable is how unremarkable it is now, they said. They’re just Brooklyn parents.  “It’s striking how uninteresting it is in a way,” Ms. Curnow said. “I have so much more common ground with my co-workers who are parents and heterosexual than many of my gay friends who are not parents.”  Or, as Ms. Reichman put it: “I identify as a parent now,” she said. “I’m a Carroll Gardens parent! I go to the park and I know everybody.”  Mary Beth Caschetta, Meryl Cohn  If there is one thing that Mary Beth Caschetta is grateful for, it is her family. Well, technically, her wife’s.  “I don’t have a really great relationship with my family,” Ms. Caschetta said. “Meryl’s family? They’re my cheerleaders.”  “They adore her,” said Meryl Cohn, her wife, on the phone at a Honda dealership, where the couple was buying their first new car in 14 years. “It’s kind of a joke between us that they like Mary Beth better than they like me.”  Ms. Caschetta found out five years ago that her father had disinherited her. (“I leave no bequest to my daughter for reasons known to her,” he wrote in his will. She has her theories, but she is not certain.) She still speaks to her mother, but she is not in contact with her three older brothers.  “Would I have been disinherited if I married my childhood sweetheart, who was a guy who lived down the street?” she said. “One hundred percent no.”  The couple met in the late 1990s, but it wasn’t until Ms. Caschetta saw Ms. Cohn on “Oprah” (in her capacity as a gay advice columnist) that she realized her attraction to Ms. Cohn. “I was like, ‘Meryl’s extremely beautiful,’ ” Ms. Caschetta said. “Now I knew I had some feelings for her.”  They moved in together in 2000 and now split their time in Massachusetts between Northampton and Provincetown. Both are writers. And like Ms. Caschetta, Ms. Cohn was surprised by how much she fell for marriage.  “I don’t have some overly romantic notion of it,” Ms. Cohn said. “We were already committed to each other, so I was surprised marriage felt so meaningful in some serious way that feels anchoring. Maybe those feelings would have happened over time anyway, but it does feel like a deeper commitment to say: ‘You. You’re the one I married.’ ”  Related: Wedding Announcement ; Modern Love: What Wasn’t Passed On  “ ‘Husband’ is a weird word, right?” Brad Reichard, 44, said the other day in Bryant Park in Manhattan.  “I use ‘spouse’ a lot,” replied Michael Shannon, the 58-year-old engineer he married.  “I refer to him as my other half,” added Mr. Reichard, who works in public relations. " ‘Spouse’ is way too formal.”  Mr. Reichard and Mr. Shannon were in New York for a two-day pit stop before retreating to their vacation home in Cape Cod, Mass. They were making their way from the District of Columbia and staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, since that is one of the few hotels they know of that will accommodate their two harriers, Tommy and Hillary.  The couple started dating in 1994 and marriage wasn’t on their mind (“Unless you really wanted to make yourself feel terrible, you don’t think about the things you’re never going to have,” Mr. Reichard said), but politics was. Starting in the early aughts, they volunteered for the budding marriage-equality movement in their home state, Massachusetts.  “When something is patently wrong?” Mr. Shannon said. “We tend to take arms.”  They were married at their Cape Cod home and had legal benefits until they moved to Washington in 2006, when Mr. Shannon took a new job.  “All of a sudden, poof, the marriage doesn’t exist,” Mr. Shannon said. “We were just two people again.”  With that came complications involving insurance forms and filling out apartment applications. (Washington did not allow gay marriage until 2010.)  The two have no plans for children (“Maybe if we were 22 now, we would have made different decisions going forward,” Mr. Shannon said), but being together is enough for them, they said.  “You have kids, you have that in common,” Mr. Reichard said. “For us? We’ve got our lives. We’ve got each other.”  In 1995, Hillary and Julie Goodridge had the most private of commitment ceremonies. It was held in their backyard in Boston. They didn’t mow the lawn. No guests were invited. They simply read vows to each other.  “This will seem crazy, but we were a profoundly private couple,” said Julie, who was pregnant with their daughter at the time (“We didn’t want to have an illegitimate child,” Hillary said, joking).  A few years later, they stepped into the spotlight as the lead plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which made all this marriage business possible. Their second ceremony was a little different. “Well, we were married in front of international media,” Julie said. That glare took a toll.  “Basically, when you’re talking about your relationship in public all day long, and that’s what we were doing, the last thing you want to do is come home at night and cozy up and talk about your relationship,” Julie said.  Two years into their marriage (and 19 years after they started dating), they separated. The divorce was made final in 2009. It’s taken some time to try to figure it all out.  “When you get separated, it’s harder to remember the good times,” Julie, 56, said. “I had to get to a place where I really felt like this woman was my family.”  One thing kept them united: their 18-year-old daughter, Annie, who is heading to Oberlin in the fall. (The couple changed their surnames to Goodridge when she was born.) Hillary, 58, now lives with her girlfriend, Harlyn Aizley, and Julie has been dating someone new this year. The former spouses speak constantly.  “This wasn’t one of those heterosexual couples where the dad moves to California or something,” Julie said.  They got through the tough times and say they’re better for it.  “People were just so pissed off with us,” Hillary said, of when news of their divorce became public. “There were leaders in the G.L.B.T. community who said, ‘You’re ruining everything; we can’t believe you’re doing this.’ ”  “What are we at now, 19 states?” Hillary said, laughing. “Clearly we ruined the whole movement. Only 19. We’d have the whole nation if we didn’t separate.”  “The generic word for ‘parents’ becomes ‘moms,’ ” Diane Curtis said.  Ms. Curtis, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, was discussing her two children, Jamie, 12, and Romy, 6. Apparently, having two moms isn’t a big deal in their Massachusetts neighborhood.  “Our neighbor, a very good friend of Jamie’s, his term for parents was moms, too,” said Ellen Leuchs, Ms. Curtis’s wife. “He’d always say, ‘We should go ask our moms; I should go ask my mom.’ But he doesn’t have two moms. He has a mom and dad.”  It helps that they live outside Northampton, Mass., which is, in Ms. Curtis’s words, “a very heavily lesbian neighborhood.”  Ms. Curtis, 51, and Ms. Leuchs, 46, met and started dating in 1994. They had a commitment ceremony in 1998 and made it legal in a small ceremony at a state park in South Deerfield, Mass.  Having children changed their relationship but, as they see it, being married has not.  “I still feel so happy that it makes all the paperwork so much easier,” said Ms. Leuchs, who works in fund-raising. “It makes me feel much more secure about things.”  Thanks to the Supreme Court ruling a year ago that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, this was the first year they did not have to file separate tax returns. “The accountants are a lot less happy now,” Ms. Leuchs said.  And with a bundle of dates to remember (when they first met, their commitment ceremony, their legal wedding, kids’ birthdays, their birthdays), they are not too keen on anniversaries.  “We were on the Cape on the day this year, and Diane said, ‘Happy anniversary!’ ” Ms. Leuchs said. “I didn’t even realize it. She reminded me and I said, ‘Oh that’s right, that’s right.’ ”
Ten years after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, the couples whose same-sex wedding announcements were the first to appear in The Times reflect on what marriage means to them.