Ten Commandments of Character Essential Advice for Living an Honorable, Ethical, Honest Life

Family Dear Joseph, My boyfriend is a Catholic, and I am a Buddhist. To me, this is absolutely no problem. Recently, however, he told me that we cannot get married unless I get baptized. I am more than willing to do so, but isn't that hypocritical? The more I think about this, the more I wonder: What sort of religion is it that decrees that two people who love each other so much should not be allowed to marry based on their feelings? I could really use some guidance. Annoyed Dear Annoyed, There are many considerations that people make in deciding whether they want to marry someone. For example, a man might think that a woman is the best friend he's ever had, a wonderful person, and potentially a great mother, but conclude that he's not sufficiently attracted to her to marry her. Is such a decision immoral or hypocritical? I don't think so, even thought the woman might be a lovely person. For your boyfriend, to share a religious faith with his wife seems to be as critical as being sexually attracted to her, and I therefore don't see his demand as necessarily hypocritical. But I find it disturbing that he focuses purely on the act of baptism, the implication being that you should go through a mechanical act in which you don't believe. It would make more sense if he asked you to study Catholicism, then decide whether or not you want to convert. If you choose not to, then it's a good thing he made you aware now of how much this issue matters to him. And if you choose to end the relationship, it probably would be wise for your boyfriend to date only Catholic women in the future rather than to go out with women to whom he is attracted and then spring this demand on them. (To be fair to him, it is possible that he might not have realized, until your relationship had progressed this far, how important his Catholic faith was to him.) Dear Joseph, I'm a Jewish woman married to a Christian man. When we met eight years ago, it became clear that I was not going to convert to Christianity, and he had no intention of becoming a Jew. His religion matters to him a great deal, as mine does to me. He did agree, however, that our children would be raised as Jews. With that understanding in mind, I happily agreed to marry him. Now, we have three children. The oldest, a girl, turned six, and I brought her to register at the Hebrew school of a local synagogue. My husband became very upset and told me that what I was doing was destroying him; he feels, he said, like an outsider in his own home. In other words, he wants to go back on our agreement and not have us favor either religion. "When they grow up, they'll choose" is his new attitude. Now I'm the one who's very upset. Shouldn't he be bound by what he told me before we married? I feel cheated and . . . Betrayed Dear Betrayed, I suspect that intermarriages are most apt to succeed when a noncommitted Christian marries a noncommitted Jew. In such a case, because religion is not particularly important to either parent, it is unlikely to become a source of conflict and distress; whatever religion or nonreligion their children choose won't usually be emotionally disturbing to the couple. A second type of intermarriage that has a better-than-average chance of succeeding is when one of the partners is committed to his/her religion, and the other is not religious. Thus, a noncommitted Jew or Christian might not be upset to see his or her child raised in another religion, since that person has little, if any, connection to the religion in which he or she was reared. But your situation presents a built-in difficulty. Each of your religious commitments matter to you, and so you're going to care that your children share in a tradition that you find meaningful. That your husband agreed, prior to your marriage, to raise your children as Jews only suggests to me that he probably didn'Telushkin, Joseph is the author of 'Ten Commandments of Character Essential Advice for Living an Honorable, Ethical, Honest Life', published 2004 under ISBN 9780609809860 and ISBN 0609809865.