Significant Day For A Couple In Love (New London Day)
Saturday, November 15, 2008
By: Chuck Potter

Jana Noyes and Barbara Dakota are no longer each other's significant other. Haven't been for awhile, actually. "I talk about Jana as my wife," said Dakota, a massage therapist and full-time student. "I do too," said Jana, a licensed marriage and family therapist.

Still, though, Wednesday was a special day for the two women from Mystic. It was the first day single-gender couples could apply for and receive a marriage license in Connecticut. And because there is no mandatory waiting period between happy and ever after, couples can marry the same day they get their license.

Wednesday they upgraded from those generic and ambiguous terms: partner, special friend or significant other.

Are not most people in your life significant? And doesn't that make “other” the operative word? Which begs, other what? Do some people have insignificant others? I digress.

Noyes and Dakota legalized their relationship Wednesday. That is, they were married, well, in the eyes of the government. Attorney, and more important, friend and Justice of the Peace Lee Cole-Chu performed the ceremony.

The women, it seems, have always risen to the level of marital status that the laws of their lands would allow.

I'm (almost) sure it was Dakota who said, “We did the civil union because I felt it was important to be counted.”

When Connecticut allowed civil unions, the women wanted to be officially counted among those who took advantage of the law to show the legislature and, ultimately, the state Supreme Court how many people it mattered to that gay and lesbian couples enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples. Experts speak of more than 1,200 rights that married couples have that non-married couples do not.

And so they married.

”Today was important because it was a historic day,” one of them said when they shared the speaker-phone for an interview just a few hours after their wedding. “We wanted to get married on the first day it was possible. It was important to be part of that history because that history is such a part of our life.”

”There are a whole bunch of protections and rights that we get as a married couple that we couldn't before, even with a domestic partnership, so this was important to do,” Dakota said. “We both own our home. We don't have to sell it to the other's estate. We can be like regular couples. If she is in the hospital, I don't have to call her brother in Pennsylvania to make a medical decision.”

What with their civil union, their government wedding is actually the third phase of their relationship.

”We've considered each other married for a while,” they said.

Noyes and Dakota were married “Under the Care of the Meeting” of the Religious Society of Friends on Oct. 5, 2002. They are both Quakers.

”The (Friends) marriage was out of the sense of spirituality, to have the presence of God in our partnership,” Noyes said. “I believe there is that of God in Barb. I honor that in her. So we were marrying each other spiritually and with a sense of community.”

They met in July 2001. The events two months later made life more complicated, and made enjoying life more urgent.

”Having met her and then, all the sudden, going through all of that. It was all-consuming,” Jana said. “I really felt, there might not be that much time. We have to say who we are and how we felt. Now.”

That was then. That was a time, Jana said, when she thought she might live out her life single and alone.

”Now I have a stepdaughter, two grandchildren,” she said. “I never thought I would have this. It's a blessing.”