A union without a hitch

Jeremy Webster, dean of the Honors Tutorial College and associate professor of English, and Paul Jones, Crowl Professor of English and departmental graduate studies director, answered additional questions about their July 21 marriage. Their personal milestone became a public one—as Athens County’s first same-sex couple to legally marry.

When did your relationship begin?

PJ: We met in 1994 when we both started in the doctoral program in English at the University of Tennessee. We quickly became friends and became romantically involved by our second year.

What difficulties have you experienced during your two decades as a couple?

JW: We lived together in Knoxville for four years until we graduated. I was offered a job here at OHIO in the Department of English, and we decided that it was better for our careers if Paul did not move here as an adjunct. Instead, we spent three years apart, and he had a different position at different universities each year for those three years. During the third year, the English Department here searched for a position in Paul’s field and he eventually got it. Those three years apart were incredibly difficult.

How has the Athens community received your relationship over the years?

JW: I always found Athens to be a welcoming, progressive community, and I have always felt safe here. My students, colleagues, and staff have all embraced our relationship without batting an eye.

PJ: We feel very supported and welcomed by Athens and Ohio University and always have. If one has to live in a small town in a rural county, I doubt there are many places as comfortable to be a gay couple as here.

When was the earliest you remember wanting to marry each other?

JW: I’ve been ready to get married for a long time but especially for the last couple of years, since the previous Supreme Court decision in 2013. But we both agreed that we wanted to wait until our marriage was legally meaningful in our home state.

PJ: Well, in our early years together in the 1990s, we never even conceived that it would be a possibility, though we certainly wanted to spend our lives together if we could find a way to do that. When I took the job at OHIO and moved to Athens, we essentially considered ourselves married even though it took another 12 years for that to become a legal reality in this state. Over that last several years, it did seem that marriage equality would inevitably come to Ohio as state after state legalized it. We just didn’t know how long we’d have to wait.

Why did you want to get married?

PJ: Probably for the same reasons any couple does. We’d decided (long ago) that we loved each other and wanted to spend our lives together … [and] wanted the protections and rights that legal married status gave us.

JW: “Marriage” is a word that means something particular. It means that we have committed our lives to one another, that we are a family. It was very important to us to have the state’s recognition of our relationship solemnized.