Tomorrow, Maine voters go to the polls to decide the fate of marriage equality in the state. Advance polling says the vote will be very close, and it will all come down to voter turnout.

Doesn’t it feel like California all over again? The uneasiness, the dread, the hopefulness cut with a pragmatic realism (even now more so, after Prop. 8, because we know what it feels like to lose it, we know the hollowness, the gut-busting pain of it).

I’m not the kind of writer who can offer the kind of analysis that seems to be the typical fodder in moments like this: the positioning, the arguing, the strategizing. it’s not what I’m good at.

Moments like these make me turn inward, think a little closer to home. (We all do what we can in moments like this, no?)

This weekend, I went to New Orleans to see my new beau, Marc. We spent Saturday roaming the city, then headed out to a Halloween party that night. It was a nice day, low key but fun, and it’s always a treat to watch a Big Gay Party in New Orleans from a detached observer’s distance.

Sunday, however, was different. Marc woke up at 8 a.m. feeling wretched. It looked and felt a lot like the flu, and his sickness put a halt on anything we’d planned for the day.

Right before I left that evening to drive back to Lafayette, through a sort of foggy haze of half-sleep and achiness, Marc looked over at me and said, “I’m sorry. I ruined your whole Sunday, didn’t I?”

He didn’t. Not even close.

Granted, we spent the entire day in bed and probably only talked for about five minutes (minus a quick trip for lunch and a mango smoothie for Marc). He slept, and I watched episodes of “Will and Grace” and ‘The Golden Girls” on DVD. And hours sped by like bullet trains, and before I knew it, it was 10 p.m. and I was gathering my stuff to head back home.

But the day was still lovely. Sometimes, he would turn over in his sleep and slide his arm through the crook of mine and sigh. Other times, he’d slide back into me so I could sling an arm over his stomach. And every once in a while, he’d crack open an eye to look at me, and he’d smile, then fall back asleep.

They’re the unexpected, unplanned things that always seem more real to me than the strategizing and the positioning and the debating. They’re the substance of our lives, and they’re the things that make marriage equality worth fighting for.

We don’t just fight for a recognition of our singular worth anymore. We’ve fought that fight, and while there are still pockets of the country that make that fight difficult, if not impossible, for the most part, our singular worth is understood. Being gay isn’t the mark of Cain it was for previous generations of gay men and women. Our value as individuals in our ordinary lives are, in many respects, understood and appreciated by the culture at large (and before you jump to negate that notion, look around. Compare today to thirty years ago and see how far we’ve come).

Now, we’re fighting for something much more important: a recognition of the validity of the lives we build with each other. This fight is about respecting the relationships we build, the love we share, the life we commit to with another person — and not just respecting them but protecting them from those who’d rather they didn’t exist, from those who’d like to see the years we invest in our husbands and wives be inconsequential and legally nonexistent.

For a Sunday, I laid beside my new beau and watched him sleep, got him water when he needed it, bought him a smoothie when he said it would make him feel better and kissed him on the forehead even if he was asleep and didn’t know it, because those are the things that you build a life on. That’s what marriages are made of, and while I’m not trying to marry Marc (I mean, come on, we just started dating, I’m not in the business of scaring the crap out of men I like). this Sunday opened a vista on what a marriage between us might look like, a quick glance into that future of “for better or worse, in sickness or in health” that we all have sitting in the back of our heads, that we yearn for.

The politics are important, yes. But the hundreds of thousands of gay couples who have spent the last 10, 15, 20 years sleeping beside their sick partner and getting them a glass of water are more important. Those lives — those quiet private lives that we don’t see everyday and that don’t make up the public face of our community’s engagement in the discourse over the marriage equality issue — are who we are in cities and towns all over the country. They’re our bedrock, our foundation, and when we argue this issue and fight for it, we need to not only fight for the political win, but we should fight for them, remember them.

If we lose tomorrow in Maine, we haven’t just lost a vote. We’ve lost something much greater. We’ll lose marriage. And that, to me, is an unacceptable loss.