This article represents the reflexive journey of one of six couples that launched a Constitutional Challenge to the definition of marriage. An account of our motivation for marriage deconstructs the experience from two disparate, yet shared, spaces. Using reflection and documentation, we explore multiple truths and realities of what the case, and the ‘right to marry’, meant to us: then, and now – 10 years later. In recounting our story, we expose the embodiment of risk taken by sexual minorities when engaging in activism and claiming heteronormative public spaces. Each with our own epistemological foundation, we explore the pitfalls and possibilities of marriage activism and consider its role as a space of queer liberation. Illustrating how the struggle for equal marriage is situated in the messy notion of what it means to be queer, we posit two narratives as a means of challenging dominant discourse. To research marriage as an objective ‘reality’ is to desexualize and depersonalize queer identity; an autoethnographic account claims the subjective sexual identity and facilitates a discussion of the nuances and complexities of queer lives and choices.

Given the vitriolic marriage debate, documenting and deconstructing our experience is an important element of queer history and praxis. Using reflexivity to explore our individual and collective perspectives and reflect upon how those experiences were shaped through intersection with family, friends, each other, community and society allows us to claim our insider positionality and challenge queer/straight binaries, force conversations about these binaries, and demonstrate how the personal is political.