Recently I attended a long-time friend’s Conservative Jewish wedding, and the event found me reflecting on my own interfaith wedding, now ten years in the past. The  wedding took place in the Conservative synagogue she’d attended since her bat mitzvah, a large, well-appointed synagogue outside a major East-Coast city.

The ceremony started in the traditional Jewish way, with the ketubah signing and bedecken, where the groom places a veil over the bride’s head and face, in a reference to Jacob’s being tricked into marrying Leah instead of her sister Rachel. As two rabbis watched, friends and relatives signed the ketubah, and I felt tears spring to my eyes as I remembered my own friends bending over our ketubah to pen their names in Hebrew characters. Today’s bride was one of those friends. My maid of honor was also present at this friend’s wedding. She is not Jewish, and had carefully transcribed her name in Hebrew onto my ketubah before also signing in English. Sitting next to me at our mutual friend’s wedding, she turned to me and smiled.

Other moments, though, emphasized the difference between this wedding and my own. We chose not to do a bedecken, for example, and our rabbi was all right with this. At my own wedding, my spouse and I each circled the other seven times, and then we circled each other simultaneously once. Yes, I felt dizzy in the ninety-degree heat! At my friend’s ceremony, she circled her groom seven times, as is traditional, but he did not circle her. Despite these differences, tears again sprang to my eyes as I saw the bride and groom make faces alternately amused and loving at each other. I remembered my gathered friends and family laughing at the funnier facial exchanges during our own circling.

These small differences, though, hardly bothered me, and in fact, served as pleasant reminders of my ceremony. I find that I cry more at weddings with Jewish elements now than I do at Christian or non-religious ceremonies: the distinctive elements of a Jewish ceremony have such a strong association in my mind.

During that day’s wedding ceremony itself, however, my mood shifted as one of the rabbis addressed the couple under the chuppah. First he made the guests laugh: “It is easy to marry the person you love, but much more difficult to love the person you married.” A chuckle rose up through the audience, emerging from my own mouth as well.

The rabbi moved on, though, to a comment that gave more pain than amusement. “We have here what could be called a best-case scenario.” I expected another amusing quip, but instead, I ended up feeling awkward, and then even angry. “Both the bride and groom come from Jewish families; both of their parents are still married, and both of them also attend the same synagogue,” he explained. I felt a sudden stab of anger and even rejection.

By implication, my own marriage was not a best-case scenario, on two counts, no matter how I might feel about it! Not only has my husband married someone who is not Jewish, but he married someone whose parents are no longer themselves together! Did missing two out of three constitute a worst-case scenario, or something in-between?

When I got over my initial shock, I wondered who else in the wood-paneled sanctuary might have felt a sudden jolt of pain at the rabbi’s words. Who else there was divorced? Married to the son or daughter of divorced parents? Or (possibly worse!), dating or married to someone of a different faith? It seemed a reasonable guess that these descriptions applied to more than a few people in the room. Was it fair of the clergy to imply that we were all in something less than a best-case scenario?

I could give the rabbi’s words a more charitable spin: As the rabbi knew, my friend’s mother converted to Judaism prior to marrying her father, making her own inclusion in the “best-case scenario” in some ways a near miss. Perhaps the rabbi’s words were meant to sooth any fears the new in-laws’ may have had about the Jewishness of their new daughter-in-law? Perhaps he meant only to reinforce her status as a “member of the tribe”?

Whatever the rabbi’s reasoning, the fact remains that this was one of the first times when I, even if indirectly or without intention, felt the sting of wider Judaism’s fear of intermarriage. Despite that sting, I chose to take the moment as a reminder that we have the responsibility to our partners, of whatever gender or marital status, to create our own best-case scenarios. Those of us who have joined ourselves together with a ketubah have a valid and binding covenant that enjoins us to create our own best-case scenarios, whether those involve intermarriage, divorce in a part of the family or other elements of awkwardness.

As my friend’s new husband stomped on the glass (I remembered hoping my new husband would not step on my foot as we crushed the glass together), I resolved, again, to work to create my own best-case scenario for myself, for my husband, for our daughters and for our loved ones.