Rachel Miller '06, Lindsey O'Brien '06 and Hundreds of Others Travel to Iowa for Same-Sex Marriages

It was a coincidence that Rachel Miller and Lindsey O'Brien celebrated their Iowa wedding the same weekend that Illinois began offering civil unions.They had been making plans for two years, ever since the Iowa Supreme Court decision brought equal marriage rights to the state. On June 3, 2011, before family and friends, the two tied the knot.

An Iowa ceremony made sense for the Illinois couple. They had met in a college poetry class at Grinnell College. Their venue, the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, sat next to O'Brien's hometown of Moline, Ill.

It was a traditional ceremony. Their fathers walked them down the aisle. Miller's grandmother came, despite initial hesitation. They danced with their parents at the reception afterward. They both wore white.

After the wedding, they boarded a Greyhound bus back to Illinois.

"As we were crossing the Mississippi [River], we were kind of like, 'well, we're demoted to civil unions,'" O'Brien recalled.

O'Brien and Miller are among thousands of LGBT couples who, since 2009, have made the trip to Iowa to get legally married.