When I woke up at 4 a.m. the morning after the election, one of my first thoughts was that I needed to marry Bo. Now to be fair, I’ve been having those thoughts for a long time now, on account of she’s awesome and I’m in love with her. But this thought wasn’t the usual happy kind. It was pure panic.

There’s a conservative trifecta coming into control of the federal government. I don’t know which LGBTQ rights they’re going to come after, but I know for sure I want the maximum legal protection available for me and Bo. And there is nobody else on Earth I’d rather face an uncertain future with.

Fortunately for me, Bo had the same thought. We were originally going to get married in late spring or early summer, maybe in Eastport. And we are still planning to have a proper ceremony, where family and friends can come together with us to celebrate our love and partnership. But in the spirit of love, passion and making sure our legal bases are covered (I come from a family of anxious lawyers), we went down to the Portland city clerk’s office on Friday, Nov. 15, and got married.

Bo picked the location because Portland has the prettiest city hall, with marble and columns and twisting wide staircases, and because there’s a one-stop shop in the clerk’s office where for $125 you can get fully married at the same window where you get your birth certificates, hunting and dog licenses (truly Mainers’ greatest needs). I wore my dusty pink Easter dress and Doc Marten boots; my bride Bo wore a kelly green thrifted Calvin Klein dress. Fashionable and frugal – she’s truly the perfect woman.

We only had my mom with us as a witness, so the other witness to our marriage was a woman working at the clerk’s desk who wasn’t busy with any dog licenses at the moment. (Thank you, Alicia!) Mom streamed my siblings in on the Zoom app on her phone so they could watch – my brother, dressed in his finest kilt, at his home in Virginia, and my sister on a tram in the Netherlands. (It’s unclear if a bunch of random Dutch commuters also witnessed the solemnizing of my marriage.)

Bo and I hadn’t thought to bring any vows – I guess I vaguely thought they would hand us some to read? – so make sure you bring some if you’re planning on a city hall wedding. To crib a line from “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “the officiant was very efficient.” Afterward, Bo and my mom and I went out to Pai Men for ramen.

The next morning, we cleaned a filter in the washing machine that neither of us knew had existed before. (She saw a video of it on Instagram.) We went to the opening night of Gardens Aglow at the Coastal Botanical Gardens in Boothbay (I don’t have enough newsprint to describe how beautiful this was). We went home and defrosted leftovers and watched an episode of “The Sopranos” (we’ve been making our way through various prestige TV series).

We kept poking each other in the ribs and giggling “we’re gay married.” I keep trying to say “my wife” with a serious tone of voice and it keeps coming out sounding like Borat. It certainly didn’t feel like we were tearing apart the foundations of society or whatever people who are against gay marriage think.

Mom once told me that on the day I was born, she held me in her arms and started thinking about my wedding. Even with her prodigious authorial imagination, I’m not sure she could have planned this particular scenario. You know who did manage to predict it? A young Victoria. Twenty years ago, when I was 12, I wrote in my journal that I was going to settle down with a nice girl someday. (And yes, I phrased it just like that. What a nerd I was.)

It was bittersweet, you know? Sweet because I got to hitch myself to the love of my life. Sweet because I’ve always kind of wanted to have a courthouse wedding. Sweet because I can call myself a wife now. Bitter because members of our families couldn’t be there. Bitter because there was even the possibility that the choice of marriage could be taken away from us by the government.

As a queer woman, I grew up knowing my rights were up for public debate. It was only 15 years ago, in 2009, that the Maine State Legislature passed a law legalizing gay marriage. It then got put to a citizens’ referendum and voters in Maine struck it down, as 300,000 Mainers voted to make it illegal for me to marry Bo.

I think about that sometimes. Do those people ever regret their vote? Do any of them read my column? Would any of them have walked up to us at the clerk’s office and said to our faces, “I don’t want you to do this, and my opinion should matter”? Not to mention the people who want to legally erase Bo, who is a transgender woman, from existence.

To those folks, I raise a middle finger. If you want to get to my wife, you’re going to have to come through me first. And to my friends, family, loved ones and readers who have been following me through the ups and downs of relationships in my quest to find The One, I raise a glass of sparkling cider. Thank you all.

But please, call me the Maine Millennial. Mrs. Hugo-Vidal is my mother.