Is this a joke?

Adam Berger and Stephen Frank - New York Times:

Photographs by Alan Zale for The New York Times

POCANTICO HILLS, N.Y., SEPT. 3 Adam Berger, left, with Stephen Frank celebrated their commitment at the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

Published: September 17, 2006

THEY had been close friends for years, first at college and later in New York, but now Adam Berger was baring his soul to Stephen Frank. “I have news: I don’t play on your team,” he said, adapting the line from “Seinfeld.”

They had gotten to know each other as freshmen at Harvard. As college progressed, they became best friends, dated women and ultimately became suite mates.

They bickered, they quibbled, they finished each other’s sentences practically before the one speaking knew what he was actually going to say. So much so, that friends jokingly began to refer to them as an old married couple.

“We considered each other best friends,” Mr. Frank recalled. “We were part of larger group, but the two of us within that group had a special bond. There was something there.”

Still, no one — not even Mr. Frank or Mr. Berger, they each insist — had any idea what that “something” between them was.

“I didn’t have even the remotest inkling, nor did any of our friends,” Mr. Frank recalled. “Neither one of us had acted on it in any way with anyone, and we were both dating women.”

After graduation, when Mr. Frank moved to Berlin on a Rotary scholarship, the men corresponded and even traveled together. Then Mr. Frank returned to New York, where Mr. Berger was living, and they picked up their friendship as if it had never left off.

One day in August 1996, Mr. Berger asked Mr. Frank to meet him for lunch. Mr. Frank had taken one bite of a burrito when Mr. Berger blurted out the news that he was gay. Mr. Frank said he was completely amazed.

Mr. Berger, now 33 and a vice president and senior investment strategist in an asset management unit of Goldman Sachs, remembered: “I hadn’t told that many people, so I was focusing on his reaction. I didn’t notice that he was nervous. I came away thinking how supportive he’d been.”

Mr. Frank, also 33 and an associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, countered wryly: “He didn’t know how supportive I was.”

Mr. Frank added: “I went from not being willing to acknowledge that I was having these feelings, to ‘This is unbelievable good fortune. This is the person I’m closest to in the world, and we could actually act on this.’ ’’

That same evening it was Mr. Frank who had news, delivered with a line worthy of “Seinfeld.”

“I haven’t been totally straight with you either,” he told Mr. Berger as they ambled through SoHo.

“You?” Mr. Berger exclaimed, stunned. By the next week, the best friends had become a couple.

Carolyn Rendell, a Harvard friend, recalled the moment she noticed the change in their relationship. “They mentioned they were going to watch Princess Diana’s funeral. I wondered, ‘What were they doing watching TV together at 5 in the morning?’ And soon after that I figured it out.”

“The transition from being friends to being partners — that felt easy,” Mr. Frank said. After all, they already knew each other.

“We work very well together,” Mr. Berger explained. “Our personalities are very different. Steve is less even-keeled.”

“We’re pretty complementary,” Mr. Frank chimed in. “One of the things I admire most and love most is that he balances me very well and has a very calming effect on me.”

David Pentlow, a married friend of theirs who shared a suite with the men their senior year and who noted that early on he, too, saw no hint of what was to come, said: “There was no period of artificiality, no period before there was comfort. It took at least a year or two for my wife and me to be that unvarnished.”

On Sept. 3, Mr. Berger and Mr. Frank celebrated 10 years as partners— and a lifetime ahead that they hope will include children — before 120 guests in a commitment ceremony at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the restaurant in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. After the ceremony, led by Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, the wine flowed and the toasts along with it. Ms. Rendell offered words inspired by Wendy Wasserstein’s “Heidi Chronicles,” in which one character tells another that if they can’t marry they should be great friends. “Adam and Steve have shown us that nothing can stop true love, that there are no insurmountable barriers to what is true and what is real.”

Mr. Berger said, “All around us were these wonderful couples who’d also been married, and it seemed important to affirm our relationship and do it in a public way.” He added, “If some constraints stopped us from being able to do it, we would have carried on with our lives, but part of life is being able to celebrate wonderful things.”