Tina observed Bette quietly, as the brunette studied the rings they had given to each other, and as she slowly kissed Tina’s hand.  A few tears had rolled down her wife’s cheeks.

It had been so easy to fall in love with her, like falling off a log, Tina thought, and once she fell, she just kept falling.  She was falling still. There just seemed to be no bottom to the depth of her love, or no ceiling to the new heights of emotion she reached by even the simplest things she did with Bette.  What was this?

Tina shook her head. What else? This was love. Her love for Bette.  Bette’s love for her.

But the story about Jacques and Joel triggered something. She wondered, could what happened to more than half of the couples in America? What happened to her parents?  What happened to Bette’s parents?  What happened to Jacques and Joel?  Could this also happen to them?  End up in divorce?  In pain?

Tina drew her hand from Bette’s grasp gently and cupped her beloved’s face between her hands, then leaned closer to kiss her softly, murmuring her vow to Bette on their wedding day:

“This is my heart’s desire – for the two of us to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and never to separate, day or night.  I want to us to be wedded, to join into something that is naturally whole, so that our two souls are made into one.  Then the two of us will share one life, as long as we both shall live, because we would be one being.”

Bette returned her kiss, then drew back, and whispered, in response,

“Because I’ve found what I always wanted, to come together and melt together with you, so that one soul would emerge from us two.  Because this Love is the name of our pursuit of wholeness, of our desire to be complete, which we know can only be with each other.  Love drew us together, toward what belonged to us.  So Love promises us the greatest hope – with that we now pray God restores us, and heals us, and makes us blessed, and happy.  And one.”

“Our vows,” Tina whispered.