Twenty-Five Years of "I Do": How the Netherlands Opened the Door in 2001

On 1 April 2001, in the small hours of the morning, four couples walked into Amsterdam’s city hall and became the first same-sex couples in the world to legally marry. The mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, personally officiated. It was not a stunt and it was not April Fool’s — it was the moment the modern map of marriage equality began to be drawn. Twenty-five years later, as WorldPride Amsterdam makes that anniversary a centerpiece of its programme, it’s worth sitting with just how radical the Dutch decision was, and how far its ripple has traveled.

How improbable it actually was

It’s easy, from 2026, to treat the Netherlands’ first-mover status as inevitable — of course the famously liberal Dutch got there first. But nothing about it was guaranteed. When the Dutch parliament passed the law in December 2000, no country on earth had ever granted same-sex couples full civil marriage. There was no template, no precedent, no reassuring example to point to. Denmark had pioneered registered partnerships back in 1989, and several countries had followed with partnership regimes that offered some of marriage’s rights while withholding its name and its full weight. The Dutch chose to erase the asterisk entirely: not a separate-but-parallel institution, but marriage itself, with the same word and the same standing.

That distinction mattered enormously. A partnership says almost. Marriage says equal. The Netherlands was the first state anywhere to say the second thing out loud.

The map it set in motion

The Dutch example did what pioneers do — it made the previously unthinkable suddenly thinkable. Belgium followed in 2003. Spain and Canada arrived in 2005, Spain over the furious objection of its bishops and much of its political right, and became one of the most enthusiastically pro-equality societies in Europe within a generation. South Africa’s constitutional court compelled marriage equality in 2006, the first country in Africa to reach it.

From there the pace picked up: Scandinavia through the late 2000s and early 2010s, a wave across the Americas, the United States by Supreme Court ruling in 2015, Ireland by popular referendum the same year, Australia by postal vote in 2017, Taiwan in 2019 as the first in Asia, and — most recently and most resonantly for anyone who follows this closely — Thailand in early 2025 as the first in Southeast Asia, with tens of thousands of couples marrying in the first year alone. More than three dozen countries now have full marriage equality. Every one of them walked through a door the Netherlands opened.

What the anniversary should and shouldn’t mean

There’s a comfortable version of this story where the arc bends smoothly upward and 2001 was simply the first domino in an inevitable march to universal equality. That version isn’t true, and it isn’t useful. For every country that has reached marriage equality, there are many where same-sex intimacy remains criminalised, and a real number where legal protections are being actively rolled back rather than extended. Even within Europe, the gap between the top of ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map and the bottom is a chasm — Bosnia, Serbia, and much of the Balkans still have no partnership recognition at all, and hate crimes are rising even in countries that lead the rankings.

So the honest way to mark twenty-five years is to hold two things at once. The Dutch vote was a genuine turning point that changed millions of lives and reshaped what was politically possible on four continents. And the work it started is nowhere near finished — the map it began is still being drawn, contested block by block, court ruling by court ruling, referendum by referendum.

Why it lands in Amsterdam this summer

There’s a reason WorldPride 2026 chose to build itself around this milestone rather than treat it as a footnote. When activists arrive at the Human Rights Conference from countries where a wedding like the one Job Cohen officiated is still unimaginable, the anniversary stops being a Dutch celebration and becomes a global one — proof that the impossible has a way of becoming ordinary faster than anyone expects. Twenty-five years ago, four couples signed a register in Amsterdam and nothing was ever quite the same. This summer, the city gets to remember that, and the rest of us get to remember how much door there still is to open.