Devout

When we decided to move in together after only a few months of dating, Gavin was nervous.

“My parents aren’t going to be okay with it. They’re really Catholic. My dad goes to church every day.” It was a foreign concept to me, this idea that the religious commitment of people I barely knew would impact my life choices. It seemed like something that would happen to someone else. In my life, religion played no meaningful role.

Still, once I began dating Gavin, the laws of Catholicism intruded at surprising junctures. The first time we stayed in his childhood home he cautioned me that we wouldn’t be able to share a room.

“Where will you sleep?”

“On the couch, I guess.”

But when push came to shove, no one protested. We slept side by side in the twin bed in his childhood bedroom. Gavin was shocked. “They must really like you.”

They also liked me enough, evidently, to condone our cohabitation. They bought us a housewarming present and helped us haul boxes into our tiny Manhattan apartment. Again, I was relieved. Religion didn’t have a chokehold on our relationship.

Still, something—maybe religion—made his parents eager for Gavin to make an honest woman of me. His mother mailed advertisements for promise rings to our apartment.

“Did you see what I sent?” His mom would ask when we visited her apartment. “You know, it’s not a wedding ring. It’s a promise ring. It’s just a way to show your intention.”

When the advertisements arrived, Gavin usually put them in the trash before I could see them. He knew I was not interested in promise rings or engagements. I was twenty-three. I was in no rush.

Still, I eavesdropped when his mother pressured him, curious about his response. I wanted him to want to marry me, even if I didn’t want to get married right then. We were young, but our certainty about one another felt novel and unflappable.

Eventually, we did get engaged. Gavin slid a round diamond onto my finger on the night of my twenty-fourth birthday. We were in love, and the word yes spilled out of me like it had been waiting for release. We called our parents and our siblings and friends. We drank champagne and welcomed tokens of congratulations from people we knew. We began to imagine the wedding. It would be in my hometown of Pittsburgh, of course. His parents, traditionalists, agreed that was appropriate.

I downloaded wedding planning guides and got started. Neither of us had planned to meet one another—to get married—so young. We had no vision. Our friends and families were happy to fill the void with their own opinions. As we visited venues and met with vendors, each of us acted as a representative for our family of origin, advocating for what we imagined they expected of us. My dad is Jewish, my mom a lapsed Catholic. Gavin grew up an altar boy. His parents, of course, were devout.

“They’ll want a priest to marry us,” Gavin told me, when I suggested we be married by a close family friend, a judge. “It’s really important to them.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, remembering similar cautions in the past. They hadn’t, after all, protested when we moved in together.

“I’m sure.” As we traveled from venue to venue, he searched for a setting that they would approve of. I imagined somewhere rustic or outdoors, airy and free. He was concerned it wasn’t traditional enough. He imagined something churchier. We sought middle ground, each of us frustrated.

“I’m not being married by a priest. Why would we?” It felt preposterous.

“For my parents. Isn’t that a good reason?”

“No. My dad is Jewish, what about him?” I didn’t think my dad would care either way, but if Gavin’s parents could be a weapon, so could mine. I used my dad’s technical Judaism as a shield against the specter of a cross, a blessing, an unwanted prayer.

One day Gavin came to me as his parents' spokesperson to present an idea: we could nix the priest at our wedding if we agreed to a private ceremony a week before the actual wedding. We could have a private Catholic ceremony for his parents, and then a big secular wedding for ourselves.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Words failed me. The problem was so obvious to me, but Gavin wondered why I couldn’t bend. What was the big deal? The point was to be married.  How we got there was just semantics.

Months passed and the wedding grew nearer. The debate continued, neither of us able to commit to a compromise. Our relationship was so young. We were used to pleasing one another, being agreeable, finding joy. We were young too. Neither of us knew which of our beliefs and preferences were nonnegotiable. Again and again we compromised on wedding arrangements, only to reconsider, each afraid we had agreed too hastily, betrayed our parents or ourselves in some important way. The entire planning process was tense and fraught. We chose a venue, a DJ, a florist and a caterer. But the question of religion was a fly we couldn’t swat away, embedded unexpectedly in other choices. What readings would we select? What would our vows say? His mother wanted a blessing before dinner. The thought made my skin crawl.

Still, I loved this man. I wanted to marry him. I wanted to be married to him, to build the life we dreamed of together. This was just a party. Surely I could hold my nose and endure.

“Fine, we can do the little secret Catholic thing,” I agreed one night, and two days later an envelope arrived.

“What is this?” I asked, when I saw its contents on the table.

“You have to sign it in order for a priest to marry us.”

I read the papers, which required me to commit to all manner of devotions. I’d renounce Satan and raise my kids Catholic.

“Is this serious?”

“I didn’t read it,” he confessed.

“I’m not signing this.”

When we visited his parents that weekend, his mother asked if we had brought the papers.

“I don’t feel comfortable signing them,” I said.

“What part?”

“The kid part. I mean, all of it. You know—I’m not Catholic. I’m not religious.” As I said the words, I realized that this was the first time I had ever voiced this reality to her.  She knew, of course, my religious background.  But Gavin had been our go-between on this issue.

“Well, I mean, you don’t have to actually do it all. It’s just a piece of paper. You just have to sign it for them to marry you.”

As we drove home, I mulled it over, confused. It seemed they were willing to die on this hill, demanding some Catholicism in the wedding, and yet, they were also okay with me misrepresenting my intentions to the church. The contradiction didn’t add up. These people, who welcomed me with open arms into their family, who always spoke of me with admiration and appreciation, were reticent in their rejection of my wishes. They celebrated my relationship with Gavin, knowing full well that we never went to church.

“Have you told your parents I don’t want this? The whole Catholic wedding thing?” I asked Gavin. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe he hadn’t.

“They know you aren’t Catholic,” he said, as though this was an answer.

“But have you told them I don’t want this?”

He thought for a while before he answered. “I guess I haven’t.”

“Do you want this? I’ll do it for you. But not for them.”

“I couldn’t care less about the religion part,” he said. “But I care about them.”

I imagined the future: the house, the kids, the adventures. Would religion be a weight around our necks? When I gave birth to our first child, would my in-laws expect a baptism, talk of souls and sins? I couldn’t bear that. For days, I walked through the city, avoiding our apartment, wondering whether this was all a mistake. I had been raised in a house that celebrated Christian and Jewish holidays without much emphasis on the underlying religious beliefs. My own beliefs—whatever they were—had never defined me. Growing up, I had felt left out by friends who belonged to youth groups or attended religious summer camps. But it had never been an issue that consumed me. I wasn’t an atheist screaming from the rooftops. I just wasn’t sure what I believed, and I wasn’t all that interested in figuring it out. My ambiguity felt appropriate. Yet now, I found myself dwelling, day in and day out, on where I stood.

I came home one night, tense, my thoughts spiraling. Planning our wedding felt painful in a way I hadn’t anticipated. It seemed to have nothing to do with us. Religion was the obvious problem, but it was the tip of the iceberg. With every choice presented to us, we fielded countless opinions: which stationary to use for invitations, which dresses for bridesmaids, opinions about the music, the favors, the programs, the readings, the vows. I could recite the wants and wishes of every member of each of our families, but I could not voice my own. In the noise of wedding planning, I had gotten lost.

I was worked up when I walked in the door, my heart racing and my muscles tense. My head swam with doubts. I wanted to marry Gavin with a certainty I had never imagined possible before we met, but the last few months had left me adrift and confused. I was terrified about a future where I felt as lost as I did in that moment.

“I told them you don’t want it,” Gavin said, before I could speak. “They’re okay with it.”

His words popped a balloon in my chest, the air rushing out, the problem deflating before my eyes.

“Really?” I was incredulous, hesitant to let the relief pour in.

“I guess I hadn’t actually told them you didn’t want it. I assumed I knew what they wanted and I assumed they knew what you wanted, and I never actually said the words. I really thought I had told them, but when you asked, I realized that I hadn’t.”

I dropped onto the couch, feeling tension ooze out of me, suddenly exhausted. I refrained from reprimanding him for his delay, for the pain it had caused.

“They’re okay with us being married by a judge, they just would like us to have a priest come and do some sort of blessing.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Will a priest do that?” Catholic priests seemed rather rules-y.

“We’ll find a rogue priest. I already googled it, and there are some rogue priests.”

“Do you want that?”

“I do. I think it will feel right to have a priest just do a blessing.”

I sat for a while, letting this new reality settle over me. Gavin expected jubilation, a triumph, but I didn’t feel that. This was a battle I never wanted to wage. I never wanted to lay down the line on an issue like this. I was exhausted.

“We could elope.” Gavin suggested hopefully, later that night, an attempt to draw me out of my own head.

“Okay,” I said, knowing we wouldn’t.

I felt like a hedon. My spiritual uncertainty enlarged and distorted. I wanted to protest that I did have faith. I believed in magic and possibility. Wasn’t this wedding proof of that: falling in love with a human whose past is entirely separate from your own, feeling seen and appreciated and special in their eyes, imagining a future where once there was only fog—it all felt supernatural. Enchanted. The stars had aligned—by physics or nature or deity—to bring us together.

On our wedding day, I removed all crosses from the chapel where our ceremony was held. I chose two poems for the readings. His sister recited a prayer after ensuring that it didn’t reference the wife as the property of her husband. We said our vows, repeating the words spoken by a judge, and when the priest gave his blessing I barely heard the words.

One year earlier, I had promised to marry Gavin. Now I promised something much bigger, something much more uncertain. I promised him a future I couldn’t see, committing to stay with and love him through whatever lay ahead, whatever versions of ourselves we became. I was not religious, but I did have faith in that which I could not see, could not know, could not prove. In this way, I too was devout.