Like many other Maine couples, Jim Shaffer and Lew Alessio got married in Massachusetts. That's where it was legal to get hitched, so that's where they did it. About a year ago, the men, who are in their early 60s, gathered friends in Newburyport and exchanged vows by the water.
To Shaffer and Alessio, the event felt like a recommitment ceremony. They had already celebrated their relationship in 2001, not long after they met. That first party was a wedding. It may not have been recognized by the government, but in their eyes it was an official commitment.
Now that Maine is close to recognizing gay marriage (the governor signed the bill this month, but opponents are collecting signatures for a referendum), Shaffer and Alessio are considering celebrating their union for a third time. Seems only right to party at home if it becomes legal to wed.
"I wouldn't mind actually having another ceremony with a certificate to acknowledge all the work we've done," said Shaffer, who with Alessio fought for the gay marriage bill to be passed in their home state.
For many gay couples, celebrations and commitments have been made piecemeal and more than once, as statutes have been approved, reconsidered, changed, and then approved again in their own home states. Massachusetts couples flocked to Vermont when it became legal to get a civil union up there. Then, when gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2004, many of those same twosomes committed to each other here, all over again.
Nima Eshghi, an attorney with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, said she and her wife marked their union only once, which is somewhat unusual. Before the gay marriage legalization process got going, many couples honored their relationships with simple, legally meaningless parties. Once sanctioned unions were approved, they traveled to be recognized. And when their home states caught up, they marked the occasions yet again.
Many couples want to at least celebrate at home once their marriages are recognized locally. It's a bittersweet thing, having to travel to an unfamiliar place to say "I do."
After Susan McCray and Yvette Pratt got news that Maine politicians had OK'd gay marriage, the Maine couple started thinking about what would be their third wedding event. The two had already celebrated their partnership with a ceremony on Cape Cod. They were ready to commit back then, and they didn't want to wait.
"We knew it wasn't legal, but we wanted to do that there together," McCray said.
Later, when Massachusetts passed its bill, McCray and Pratt got married - for real - in the middle of the night by a judge at Cambridge City Hall.
"That was a great moment," she said. "He was also a divorce court judge. He said, 'I don't want to see you back in here.' "
That would have been enough, but McCray and Pratt live in Maine, where they've lobbied for gay marriage rights. Now that their union might be recognized up north, their friends want to celebrate. "My students and teacher friends have taken this on," McCray said. "Everybody wants to come to the wedding." Take three.
Christine Nickerson, who celebrated a civil union with Inga Bernstein in 2002 and then married her in their home state of Massachusetts in 2004, said she got hitched twice for some practical reasons. Nickerson and Bernstein were expecting twins the year gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts and were concerned that both of their names wouldn't be allowed on the birth certificates if they didn't get married.
They now celebrate the date of their civil union as their anniversary, although their children, who are now almost 5, have asked why they got married twice.
"They never existed in a time when their parents weren't able to be married," Nickerson said. "That's a luxury, right?"
Eshghi says it is. These bits and pieces of marriages are confusing - and time consuming - but celebrating two or three times has been better than not being allowed to celebrate at all.
"It's complicated but it's happy," she said. "It's a much better problem to have."
Meredith Goldstein can be reached at mgoldstein@globe.com. You can read her daily Love Letters dispatch and chat with her every Wednesday at 1 p.m. at www.boston.com/loveletters. 
