Vermont has struggled with the "M-word" all year. The state Supreme Court ruled in December that same-sex couples must be allowed "the common benefits and protections that flow from marriage under Vermont law." The court pointedly left it up to the Legislature whether to let gays into the hallowed institution or set up "a parallel 'domestic partnership' system." In January, lawmakers began hearing public testimony in the gold-domed Statehouse in Montpelier.

One of the citizens testifying was Montpelier plumber Ann Ross. She has lived almost half her life with Emily Tanner, the last 14 years in a huge Victorian house painted lavender. She declared to the Legislature, "I've been wanting to marry Emily for 20 years."

"I used the word 'marriage' and the word 'wife' in my testimony because it's part of our culture in the United States," explains Ross. "You want to run up to someone and say 'I got married today,' not 'I got civil unioned today.' The words are painful and stressful. It's like when you refer to your 'partner' and people say, 'Oh, what's your business?'"

But the Legislature opted for the parallel system, and the language in bill H.847 does deaden the romance of marriage. "Groom" and "bride" are amended to "one party to a marriage or civil union" and "the other party." And, as Ross points out, the lack of a real verb can steal a lover's thunder. It's a semantic but significant cheat, to offer gays the tax breaks, insurance coverage and medical decision-making rights but to deny them the corny poetry of those four little words every girl -- or boy, or party to a civil union -- wants to hear.

Because no matter how sophisticated we act, Americans can't shake the mysterious mojo of marriage (why else all the outrage over "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?"). Matrimony's hold extends beyond the Christians who descended on Montpelier by the busload to defend it from "Adam and Steve." Weddings turn smart, cynical women with mortgages and careers into girls playing with Barbies, dressing their friends all alike and themselves like fairy princesses, while their fiancés play almost-trapped prey in bachelor party rituals. The purely symbolic power of "I do" rang clearly from Vermont this summer: Of the 434 same-sex couples that tied the knot between July 1 and August 25, 296 were from out of state, where their vows are legally meaningless.

Ross and Tanner had been civil unioned a week when we talked over herbal tea in their sunny, cluttered kitchen. Though Tanner calls herself the "lipstick lesbian" of the couple, she played the grudging groom when she and Ross tied the knot in their living room. Even after the Vermont law passed, Tanner just wasn't sure she wanted to commit; this after living with Ross for 20 years and raising two children together. "People always laugh when I say that," she admits, "but I've been there and done that; I didn't want to be married anymore."

Once they decided to civil unionize, Tanner says, "[Ross] wanted to rent an arena and have Melissa Etheridge play. I was just as happy to have our little shotgun wedding at home." Ross -- short-haired, burly, reticent -- says she never liked girl stuff growing up. But she's longed for a wedding with Tanner: "I took her to Vegas one year and bought us rings. I just felt we should celebrate our lives."

Ross's previous "marriage" makes a lesbian civil union look like Ward and June Cleaver. Tanner's nuptial history is more traditional: In her early 20s, she married a man named Doug and they built a house and had a baby. She and Doug were intellectually compatible, both "hippies and into free love," but fairytale propaganda nonetheless poisoned the relationship.

"Growing up as a seemingly heterosexual girl, it seemed like marriage was the answer," Tanner says. "All of the incredible romantic promises of what happens between people -- what you are to them and what you'll be to them ... [the idea] you got carried away from all of the trouble and heartache and the prince made everything better." To her surprise, she found these expectations "literally kicked in at the ceremony and right after."

Husband and wife were both disappointed in the reality, and Doug moved out when their son, Silas, was 2. Tanner then took up with a mechanic named Mark, "a redneck who turned me into a feminist. He wanted me barefoot and pregnant and would take care of anything. It was different from my partnership with Doug ... but I needed someone who could fix things and plow my road." Mark moved in and, around this time, Emily Tanner, town librarian, met Ann Ross, the water commissioner.

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