My favourite part was sitting with couples, talking about their lives and why they wanted to marry. But I’m equally happy to have left it behind
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I was in my mid-20s in the mid-2000s when I became a professional yapper. I’d had to bow out of a career in Auslan interpreting due to injury, but could still talk under wet concrete. Studying to become a civil marriage celebrant felt logical – I wanted to know what love was, and I knew it could show me.
Being appointed by the attorney general’s department involved a Certificate III and rigorous application process. I had to prove I was “of good standing” and “believed in the definition of marriage”. As a card-carrying homosexual, I wrote about my belief in all kinds of love, including marriage. It couldn’t take that long, I thought, for us to be recognised as having committed partnerships. Waiting a long, loathsome decade proved me wrong.