Question:

I am Baptist and my boyfriend is Jewish. Can we still make it work? I am trying to learn about Judaism.

Answer:

I've had a lot of experience with these kinds of relationships. Real short, I'll try to describe what's involved:

There are two stages in a long term relationship between a man and a woman. First, they fall in love. That's a kind of insanity that befalls most of humanity at some point. Without it, no one would ever get married.

But—and this is the crucial point—that insanity almost never lasts too long. One day, you wake up and here's this guy that you've hitched up with forever and ever—and you can't for the life of you remember why. What got into you? This is nuts!

That's when real love has to enter. Real love is when you find you have common goals, a common vision in life, way of looking at things....and you put all that together to make a marriage.

What we find, over and over, is that when a couple marries that has a vastly different background, the first stage can go great—but that second stage is a disaster.

You have to keep in mind that being Jewish isn't just a religion or a faith, like being a Baptist. A person is Jewish because he shares a huge heritage of thousands of years, a big long story, with all the other Jews. Wherever he goes, he carries that story with him. There's no way, as hard as he may try, that he can escape it.

Right now, that story he's carrying is not getting in the way of your relationship. But inevitably it will. We've seen that over and over.

My advice? if you want what's best for yourself and what's best for him, make it a nice friendship. And then look for someone that you can build a home together with. A home that will last.