In 1999 my husband and I met with an attorney who had offered to advise us pro bono on what to do about the fact that, since he had no birth certificate, Göran couldn’t convince the U.S. passport office that he was a citizen. He’d submitted written requests and processing fees to the bureaus of vital statistics in Iowa, Illinois, and Tennessee (tracing back the steps of his life). During the course of these investigations, we discovered that his mother had been going under an assumed name, had lied to him about who his father was (she said he was a native Hawaiian), and wasn’t, in fact, a native of Trinidad. Unfortunately, she had died three years earlier of leukemia, so we were left with a cloud of unanswered questions.

Our attorney looked grim. As long as Göran could not prove his citizenship, he had no rights under American law. He could be deported. If there was no place to deport him to, he could be imprisoned indefinitely. Until we could find the documentation to prove he was a citizen, we had better be careful whom we told about his situation. We should avoid getting on the radar of certain government agencies. Göran had always lived a law-abiding life, holding down a job, paying taxes, and voting—but that last activity, we learned, could lead to charges of voter fraud, and then worse.

Göran and I met in 1991 at the Gay Nineties, then the largest gay club in the upper Midwest. We had had our eyes on each other for a long time, but he was the first to invite me to dance. We danced all night until the bar closed at 2 a.m. We left, walking together, each thinking he was following the other home, until we ended up hopelessly lost in some forsaken part of the north side of Minneapolis. We laughed ourselves silly when we realized our error.

After a turbulent courtship, punctuated by a break-up and then an unexpected reunion, we became a couple in 1992. My devout Mormon family fell in love with this fine-featured, dapper, debonair, naturally generous African-American man with a quirky sense of humor and a passion for science fiction. (We were both Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons nerds.) He envied the fact that on my Anglo father’s side we could trace our family tree back to the 16th century, and on my Finnish mother’s side to the 18th. He had never been to a family reunion before attending mine in 1994. He didn’t know who his father was, or, really, who his mother had been.

We slowly exhausted our options trying to normalize his citizenship situation. His mother had failed to provide consistent information on any documents related to his identity, so we didn’t know if he was born in 1963, 1964, or 1965. More importantly, the passport office refused to grant a passport on the basis of three alternative forms of ID that were all conflicting. Applying for naturalized citizenship in either the U.S. or Canada was impossible if you couldn’t prove where you were from. We interrogated Göran’s half-sisters and foster dad who ran an ad in the papers in Memphis, where he had met Göran’s mom. We pled with our congressman and one of our senators to consider introducing a personal bill for him. (They refused to even meet with us.) At the urging of a friend, we even consulted a psychic.

We finally gave up on the possibility of ever finding a resolution, learning instead to live with the grinding uncertainty of what might happen if the wrong agency learned of his status, or if employment laws changed to require that Göran provide more definitive proof of citizenship than a social security card. We wondered if, in old age, he would even be able to collect social security. In denying him a past, his mother had also managed to put Göran’s whole future in jeopardy. Sometimes the situation made me too angry for words. I tried to cope by following Christ’s adage, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” (Matthew 6:34).

Or, in our case, “Love, love will keep us together . . .” Love was both a source of anguish and its cure. The thought of separation, should things go awry, was unbearable. The thought that we could be torn apart under the law and have no recourse was terrifying. Our love was our vulnerability. But it was also our strength. It was for love that we dared to carry on. Its rewards could be enjoyed only in the present moment in any event. We learned to live and love one day at a time. And love taught us to hope for a future, even against the logic of the situation.

That was what most gay couples had to do in the 1990s, anyway, since state after state (including our own) was passing laws or constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Committing to love a same-sex partner came with no guarantees. In fact, you could anticipate extra trials in sickness or other hardships, and extra cost—extra trouble even without hardships.

Then Martin Olav Sabo, Norwegian-American congressman from Minnesota’s fifth district, finally retired in 2007 after 29 years in office, and young, up-and-coming Keith Ellison—the first Muslim ever elected to the U.S. Congress—took Sabo’s former seat (causing a bit of a political kerfluffle when he insisted on being sworn into office on Thomas Jefferson’s Koran). Based on a few encounters we’d had with Ellison on the campaign trail, Göran hoped that he might be both willing and able to help us with our predicament. We dared to write his office a letter, and, to our grand amazement, were soon contacted by one of his assistants, who told us that they wanted to help. They asked us to provide a copy of whatever records we had accumulated on our quest, along with a brief summary of what we knew and how we knew it. We sent them a packet a couple of inches thick.

Then in June 2007, Göran received a phone call. “Are you sitting down?” Ellison’s assistant asked. They had found his birth certificate.

The key to resolving the entire situation had boiled down to a question of authority. We had, in fact, accumulated all the information we needed to get his birth certificate some years earlier. But our request to perform a birth record search was denied by the state of Tennessee because Göran did not have documentation to prove that he was the person requesting the birth record. (Which, of course, if we’d had, we wouldn’t have needed the birth record in the first place!) Ellison, using the prerogatives of his office, had been able to get the bureau of vital records to finally do the search, and then, when they found the birth certificate matching the parameters, to release a certified copy to us.

It is impossible to adequately describe what receiving that piece of paper felt like. Göran was legitimate. We were free. It was as if a key had been turned in a lock and a great gate swung open, enabling us to finally enter the kingdom.

Then other gates opened. One year later, in July 2008, we were legally married in the state of California. Another act of faith. We knew that our California marriage would not be recognized in Minnesota, which at the time still had a doma law in place. We had no reason to believe it ever would be. A few short months later, same-sex marriage was abrogated in California by Proposition 8, and all we had left was a piece of paper on our bedroom wall to commemorate something unrecognized but nevertheless real.

In August 2008, in Memphis, Tennessee, we finally met Göran’s father, his grandmother, his Aunt Dottie (who had cared for him as a baby), scads of other aunts, and cousins—once, twice, thrice removed. The reunion, on the front lawn of Aunt Dottie’s house, was epic, cinematic. We laughed and we wept. “I have a place in the universe,” Göran said later that evening, as we lay awake in bed. That night, I dreamt that we were in the Celestial Kingdom where I found out that I had married into a royal family. Our love had become a mansion. I could see it from outside the gates.

When the news of the new policy requiring a disciplinary council for lds Church members in same-sex marriages broke, I expected to feel as if a similar long night of uncertainty was descending. Especially since I have a testimony of the Church, which I experience as an almost tangible reality, as an ineluctable feature of my spiritual life. I spent nineteen years trying to escape this fact, but have found over the past twelve years since coming back that, while there was much happiness life could afford me away from the Church, it was not complete until I came back (though I would never impose my sense of this on others; they must discern and act as their conscience and personal experience guide them). My commitment to the Church—idiosyncratic as it understandably looks given my commitment to my husband—is rooted in my relationship with God. It represents my commitment to and love for God, and God’s commitment to and love for me

But the policy sent a shockwave through both the lds lgbt community and me. It reminded us that we were once deemed guilty of “abominations,” of pursuing “unnatural affections,” that we were better off in a casket, and that now we are considered “counterfeit families,” guilty of apostasy, “plan stoppers.” What could allow us any kind of hope? What gives me hope?

First there is love, invisible but real: the force that takes strangers and turns them into family; that takes a relationship between two people and turns it into a home that can shelter, heal, and inspire many. Love motivates us to turn dreams into reality. Sacrificial love reveals the Father and the Mother to us. By connecting us, love situates us in the Universe; it gives us a place and a name. Göran and I sensed the power of it in 1991, clueless as we were back then, when we began to dance together on the floor of the Gay Nineties club. Love has kept us together for almost a quarter century. My relationship with my husband isn’t an act of defiance. If there were perversity in it, it couldn’t have sustained us in the way it has.

While dealing with some of the community impact of the new policy has been painful, it hasn’t shaken my sense of the reality and power of our love and its legitimate place in our world and in the cosmos. When I turned to God in prayer the day after the new policy broke, I found peace. If anything, the spiritual and personal experiences I’ve had in the months since have confirmed that our relationship is part of God’s plan for us.

I have this vision of me­—of us—existing within a network of relationships, with each other, with our respective families, with our community, as a part of civil society, with the Church, with God and with our entire human family. My relationship with Göran is only comprehensible within those larger contexts. That’s why marriage is so important. That vision is, however, at best only partially realized in this present world—as are any of our visions of wholeness, whether the Church’s vision of Zion, or more secular visions of liberty, fraternity, and equality. That is why my journey—our journeys—require faith.

Faith teaches us to be attentive to those things that are real, even when they’re invisible. My relationship with my husband and the wholeness it has allowed us, my relationship with God and the strength and the vision that God has given me, have enabled me to continue on even in a world where that vision of full interconnectedness, of justice, of equality are only partially realized. When my husband’s status as a citizen was uncertain, when we didn’t know if we might be ripped apart and he might lose his freedom, we had to live on a certain kind of faith. Our society told us that there was no place for our relationship, and possibly no place for Göran. We knew better, and that knowledge inspired us to persevere, until one day, someone in authority was able to unlock a door for us, and Göran’s status was resolved. Shortly after that, another authority unlocked another door and we were able to marry.

The realness of our love and the realness of God have taught me that the triumph of the right and the good, the recognition of all God’s children within an equal, inclusive, loving cosmos full of intelligent, loving beings is inevitable. It requires only our faith, our perseverance, and our willingness to go forward even when everyone and everything around us in the world tells us it is impossible. I remain hopeful because our love for each other roots us—and has always rooted us—in these larger, invisible, only partially realized realities. These present trials are passing. God is preparing us for eternity.