Leaps of Faith

The day my fiance, John, and I were scheduled to pick out our wedding invitations, we spent the morning helping my brother move out of his house. He had just announced his divorce, and by the time we loaded the first suitcase, we knew switching gears from packing up the remnants of a family to debating font sizes and ribbon width would be impossible.

We drove home instead of going to our appointment. I cried; John stared straight ahead. As we neared my street, we started to argue over whose method of grieving was more appropriate: Mine was too emotional, his too rational.

Once the fighting began, it lasted for several weeks. We fought about little things like radio stations and movies and big things like money and kids. We even fought about fighting: who started it, whose tone was more condescending. To outsiders, we tried hard to be the same smiling couple we'd always been, but in private we hardly recognized ourselves. The irony of that point wouldn't hit me for weeks.

We were upset about the divorce, of course, not the radio, and we were arguing out of fear, not anger. Every now and then, we'd stop and reassure each other by saying, "Never us." But deep down lingered the question: No one gets married thinking they'll wind up divorced. What makes us different?

John and I had said "I love you" within a few weeks of meeting. On a hazy August night just seven months later, he proposed. As if by magic, as he stood up to place the ring on my finger, the band began to play our song, "Our Love Is Here to Stay." John swore he hadn't planned it. We were convinced we were meant to be.

Intellectually, I knew the statistics were not promising, but emotionally they had little impact on me, since divorce had always been something that happened to other people. Suddenly, we couldn't hide behind an abstraction anymore, and my brother's divorce was so real it threatened to destroy our relationship. The thing is, marriage is never really just about two people. When we say "I do," we bring all the people who matter most into the union with us.

It's convenient to look back and say we had some inkling of their divorce, but we really didn't see it coming. No one did. In fact, we'd just asked my brother and his wife to be in our wedding. I had grown up watching them, and they were the kind of couple I had hoped John and I would be.

Like all couples marrying in the Catholic Church, John and I had completed a marriage prep course where we earnestly tackled issues like finances, child rearing, spirituality, and sexuality. We were confident in our compatibility, but until confronted with the divorce, we hadn't thought about what would happen if we strayed from those points of agreement. Because of my brother, we were forced to have some tough conversations that would have been easy to avoid otherwise. We hated that our lesson was at the expense of our family's pain, but we left that phase of our relationship with more strength and less naivete than we had before it.

Joining your life to someone else's is the biggest risk there is. So why do it, especially given the bad odds? The only guarantee you can have is the knowledge that you love someone. That's what John and I had when we ultimately married; that's what my brother and his wife had had; that's all anyone really has. I have to believe that that knowledge alone is worth the risk. There will always be the chance for failure, but there will always be the chance for success.

As newlyweds, when we think about our future, we think of it in terms of how each of us will grow without our growing apart. Love deepens; it bends and changes to be what we need most, even if we don't always see that right away. It will grow with John and me if we give it the chance, and that's all we need to know.

Laurie Edwards is a writer based in Boston. E-mail comments to coupling@globe.com.