“I’ve been tracking it on our site’s chat boards,” said Carley Roney, editor in chief of the wedding site the Knot, which has had a gay wedding section since 1998. “Now that more states are legalizing gay marriage, parents are saying, ‘Oh, good, so you told me this was serious and I’ve been supporting you, but now you can make it official.’ ”  In a sense, it’s no different from what drives overbearing parents everywhere.  “Parents come to me with an existential anxiety to know that their children are going to be O.K. and taken care of when they’re gone,” said Naomi Bernstein, a clinical psychologist in Great Neck and Rockville Centre, N.Y.  But gay weddings have special meaning for some parents, especially if they struggled to accept their child’s sexual orientation.  “Parents with gay kids initially might think they’re not going to have a quote-unquote normal life,” Dr. Bernstein said. “But once they get over that, they say: ‘O.K., great. You’re gay, fine. But now nail someone down who can take care of you.’ ”  JUST as important, a civic wedding offers social validation, not just before the state, but in the eyes of relatives and friends of the parents.  “The parents have been supportive, but now they want the payoff,” Ms. Roney said.  One parent seeking that official stamp is Vicki Robinson, 58, a physics professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester. Ever since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the same-sex marriage bill on June 24, Ms. Robinson has been nudging her 27-year-old daughter, Stephanie Pollanen, to marry her girlfriend of six years, Lindsay Hall.  “I’m a Bible-thumping Lutheran who just got my church to put rainbow stickers on their door,” said Ms. Robinson, who is divorced and uses her maiden name. “If they were married, I would feel more like I could write Lindsay’s name in the family Bible in ink.”  But her daughter has refused to share her thoughts on marriage, so Ms. Robinson has taken to following her daughter’s Twitter feed for signs of matrimonial chatter.  “I intercepted a Twitter tweet of my daughter’s one day to a friend indicating that perhaps a wedding was on the horizon,” she said. “So I took my daughter and her girlfriend out to dinner and bought several rounds of martinis, and her partner happened to spill that they had discussed plans for a fall wedding.”  Nothing has been set, but that has not stopped Ms. Robinson from planning the big day in her head.  “Lindsay is small and adorable, so I see her in a flapper thing in ivory silk with an overlapping handkerchief hem and a cloche,” she said. “My daughter is larger than Lindsay and very curvy, so I see her in an old-fashioned off-the-shoulder wedding dress with a big skirt.”  Table settings and menus have also been considered.  “I also see lots of flowers and a string quartet with a band for dancing after,” Ms. Robinson added. “The food would be fabulous and exotic, maybe something sort of Moroccan-Middle Eastern.”  For the record, Ms. Pollanen said that she and her partner would not marry for at least a year because of school and finances. Ms. Pollanen, a bookstore supervisor in Troy, N.Y., plans to go to graduate school to study organizational development; her girlfriend, a receptionist, will study massage therapy this fall.  But when the time comes, Ms. Pollanen intends to include her mother in the wedding planning. “If I want her to keep speaking to me, that is,” she said.  Some mothers take their meddling to a professional level. Gretchen Hamm of Dallas became so involved in her daughter’s 1999 commitment ceremony in Maryland that she started a site, GayWeddings.com, to fill what she saw as a void.  “I couldn’t find a two-brides wedding-day memory book for Kathryn and her partner,” Ms. Hamm said. “I even became a virtual mom to some couples whose own parents wouldn’t accept them.”  The flip side today are parents who take acceptance too far and push for marriage way before the couple feels ready.  “As soon as the New York marriage bill passed, my very loving, overprotective mom called me and asked, ‘Are you thinking about this?,’ ” said Eliot Glazer, 28, a television editor who lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. He has been dating Neil Price, 28, a film sales executive in Chelsea, for nine months and just met Mr. Price’s parents. “I was like, ‘No, um, I mean, maybe?’ ”  His mother, Sandi Glazer, an office manager who lives in St. James, N.Y., is unapologetic.  “If Eliot thinks I’m pushy, I know other moms who are worse,” she said.  OF course, when parents push too hard on the marital front, tension can arise. Jean Malpas, a gay psychotherapist in New York who works with many gay couples, advises patients with pushy parents to tell them, gently and repeatedly, “I’m so glad you’re supportive and excited, but we want to make this decision ourselves.”  Dr. Bernstein added that parents should examine their motives.  “If your child is happily coupled and everything’s great, why is this so important to you?” she said. “Instead of constantly asking your child, ‘When are you getting married?’ get to the heart of your feelings, which might be, ‘I want to feel that you’re going to be taken care of.’ ”  The new law has also created a wedge between some same-sex partners. Now that marriage is an option, happily cohabiting couples are having to navigate new questions about commitment, monogamy, finances and legal obligations that did not exist before.  These issues have dogged gay couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage was legalized in 2004.  “I had a male couple who’d been together for 15 years, but when marriage became an option and one of them wanted to marry, the other said, ‘No way,’ ” said Edouard Fontenot, a psychologist in Boston with many gay clients. “We had a four-year therapy process where the resistant partner ultimately realized that marriage, in addition to its economic benefits, wouldn’t change their day-to-day life.” The couple eventually married.  Others weren’t so lucky, including a woman in her late 40s, and her partner, who was in her early 30s.  “The younger woman thought, ‘Isn’t this opportunity wonderful: we’re moving from the outside to the inside,’ ” Dr. Fontenot said. “The older woman just couldn’t see any value in the traditional institution of marriage. She said, ‘This is something that’s been used to beat us down.’ It wasn’t the only thing they broke up over, but it was a big point of conflict.”  Partners who ultimately accepted marriage were able to redefine it, Dr. Fontenot said, from “something monolithic” to “something you shape to your own needs and desires.” Same-sex couples, he added, “have an opportunity to construct their marriages self-consciously in a way straight people have been denied.”  As for Mr. Breslow and his marriage-or-bust stepmother, there might be some wiggle room after all. To appease her, Mr. Breslow is willing to entertain the notion of a wedding-like celebration, which he sees as a party to celebrate his relationship.  “But I don’t want a proper wedding,” he added. “I want it to be really queer and outrageous and angry, with a punk-rock drag queen playing hardcore music and people being naked.”  Ms. Gray has a slightly different vision: “It would be very sophisticated and urban. And I would do the food, which would be very foodie California: maybe a mix of Jewish, which we are, and Dominican, which Dan is. Everything would be lovely and sophisticated and not tacky.”  The couple would wear tuxedos, she added, and she would wear Prada or Jil Sander.  On second thought, the couple might want to consider eloping.
With same-sex marriage now legal in New York, some gay sons and daughters are starting to feel the same heat from parents as their straight siblings do.