Amsterdam ? Dolf Pasker and Gert Kasteel are just like any other married couple two years on, settling into the mundane routine of daily life together. They finish each other’s sentences. They laugh at each other’s jokes. When one goes to make the coffee, the other playfully teases about whose job it is to work in the kitchen. The only thing that makes their marriage unusual is that they are both men.

While the United States fiercely debates the issue of allowing same-sex marriage, marriage for gay men and lesbians in the Netherlands has become so commonplace that today, two years after being legalized, it is hardly recognized as different.

As many as 8 percent of all marriages here are now between people of the same sex, according to gay activists. Gay men and lesbians advertise their marriages and host lavish parties for friends. And some of those who got married are getting divorced and paying court-ordered alimony.

“I don’t understand what people have against it,” said Pasker, 44. In April 2001, he and Kasteel became one of the first four same-sex couples allowed to wed at Amsterdam’s city hall. “People just don’t understand what it is to be gay, and what it is to want a normal life.”

Pasker, a social worker, and Kasteel, 42, a medical supplier, have what by their account would be considered a normal, loving home life. They share a comfortable townhouse. They have two dogs, friendly neighbors, and a host of relatives who now see their union as nothing but ordinary.

“We are a couple, and neighbors and friends and family see us as a couple,” said Pasker. “I think it’s the same as for straight couples. When you are married, people see you as a couple more than before.”

One of the other four couples among the first to marry, Helene Faasen and her wife, Anne-Marie Thus, are also perplexed by Americans’ resistance to same-sex weddings. They have settled into an ordinary domestic routine. Faasen works as a notary public, and Thus stays home to raise their two children, Nathan, 3 1/2, and his sister Myrthle, 1 1/2.

Opponents of same-sex marriage in the United States often point to homosexual couples raising children as one of the most dangerous consequences of allowing gay men or lesbians to wed, saying it breaks down the traditional nuclear family. But Faasen sees her family life as actually just that — traditional — with herself as the breadwinner and Thus staying home with the kids.

“I’m wondering what all the fuss is about, because it’s functioning very well in Holland,” Faasen said in an interview in her book-lined office. “We have a pretty standard family — two wives, two children in school.”

Thus was the birth mother of the two children, using sperm from an unknown donor to a sperm bank, and Faasen legally adopted them. She said the children now make no distinction between their two mothers, referring to them as “Momma Helene” and “Momma Anne-Marie.”

Henk Krol, editor of Gay Krant (Gay Courier) magazine, and the leading advocate in the Netherlands of opening marriage to gay men and lesbians, said that about 20,000 children are being raising by same-sex couples, most of them lesbian.

Krol said that marriage registry records show that 7 percent to 8 percent of marriages in the country are between gay men or lesbian partners. “It’s going smoothly,” he said. “Once people are used to it, there’s no problem whatsoever. It’s not an issue anymore. As long as you don’t have it, it’s an issue.”