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You write that at the end of your husband's life "it seemed as if the goods of marriage were present more intensely in that hospital room than had ever been before." How can we experience good in the midst of evil?

Difficult circumstances of whatever kind tend, at least in the context of marriage, to move you faster in the direction that you were already going. I have friends who had a handicapped child some years ago. And the person that made the diagnosis sat them down together and said, This will make or break your marriage. And she says that really happened. They decided to be on each other's team and to pull together through this very unexpected and tragic thing, which was open to blessing at the same time.

And I think that certainly was what happened to Hyung Goo and me. The difference was that we encountered it even before we were married. And so we had to decide whether we wanted to embark upon this, under the circumstances.

When you're faced in a very direct way with the limitations of your life and the reality that there will be worse as well as better, it can sober you up. You have to do it together or you won't be able to manage.

What did you learn about Christian marriage from your experience?

When Hyung Goo and I were deciding whether we wanted to marry each other, I noticed how everybody, Christians included, thought that the only sane way to step into marriage was if you could maintain your fantasy that everything will be fine forever. That meant we shouldn't do it because marriage is supposed to be this pathway strewn with rose petals. And you have to be able to pretend that it will be only that way for the foreseeable future. But it's not. And knowing that is actually helpful for making marital decisions.

You're not choosing a particular future when you decide to get married, you're choosing a partner for whatever the future brings. And you're choosing to look upon a potential marriage partner as the person that, no matter what happens, I want to do this together with you. That can help to lay a more solid basis for a marriage. You're always going to be hit by curve balls and even the things that you expect are always going to be more challenging when they arrive than what you had imagined.

When you married Hyung Goo you knew he was HIV-positive, and given the state of medicine at that point, you knew where that was going to lead. Did you still have a lot of surprises to deal with? Was the reality more difficult than you expected?

I don't think anybody really knows what they're getting into when they get married. But what surprised us was how rich it all was. People in love, people deciding to get married, think that they've reached a really deep mature point and that if anybody really knows what love is, they do. That's certainly the way we felt. And a few years later we realized that we'd had no idea.

The biggest surprises lay in the fact that there was so much to being intimate partners and so much to know about each other and so much to learn about how to do it together and how to give each other space and be intimate at the same time. Those things you only learn by doing.

Another thing was that we had a lot of help. Most of us go through life thinking either we don't need help or we shouldn't need help. And nobody else seems to need help. But we could not possibly have thrived the way we did without all the help we had.

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August (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47