Why are we even discussing gay marriages? It’s obvious that a gay marriage can’t be right. I’ve been an accomplice in friends’ marriages and I was cast in a starring role in my own nuptials, and know this for sure: Surviving a wedding is not a gay time at all.

You can strive for merely moderate aggravation tracking down halls and caterers, agreeing on dresses and colors, and trying to keep Aunt Bertha out of the way. But gay – forget it.

Who needs a constitutional amendment to prevent gay marriages? Just trying to get a couple to agree on the wedding invitations and who will receive them pretty much ensures that.

A wise person once said there are two great tests a couple must endure to calculate the strength of their marriage. The second is if they can wallpaper together without the neighbors finding it necessary to call police.

The first is planning the marriage itself.

Everything else is gravy – unless it really is gravy and the one of you who didn’t make it contorts like a lemon tester after tasting it.

Even then, silences and wallpapering can be overcome. Grandma claims my mom and dad weren’t speaking just before their wedding. They went through with it anyway, then wallpapered together. Last year they celebrated their 50th anniversary and seem more in love than ever.

But never once have I heard Dad say his wedding remotely resembled gay. It was so bad that he tried to talk me into eloping.

I learned that Dad is a wise man.

Without spending up to a year fretting over every pesky detail while fending off all the people trying to run your wedding for you, what’s there to get frustrated about? Unplanned marriage probably would be gay.

But I’m only speculating.

My own wedding wasn’t as tortuous as it could be because we rammed it through in two months. It was an extremely stressful two months I’d never care to repeat. Like most marriages, the gaiety – which eventually wore off – didn’t start until the wedding was a distant nightmare.

For example, I nearly excluded my own mother. We planned a lovely ceremony in an outdoor pavilion among hundreds of trees. I forgot about Mom’s allergies. She thought we didn’t want her.

When it came to a picnic-style reception in an alcohol-free park, some of the guests threatened revolt. And when I hiked off to get the car and was waylaid by well-wishers, the maid of honor snapped at me that my betrothed was seething.

When I rushed back through the woods, I found that now that the wedding was over, the rituals complete and the guests gone away, instead of seething, she actually was inhaling the soothing respite and looking the most relaxed I’d seen her in two months.

“It’s lovely now, isn’t it?” she said.

Gay marriages, indeed.