Elizabeth

Hi, Dr. John.

How are you this morning?

Doing okay.

Thank you so much for taking my call.

I'm a big fan of the show.

Oh, I promise I'm real, but thank you.

Well, thank you.

My question is, can I marry my boyfriend if we have different religious backgrounds?

Yeah.

So I met my boyfriend in college in the Northeast, and I am from the South.

And I grew up going to church, and I'm a Christian.

And my boyfriend is from San Francisco, and his family is all nonreligious, and he's an atheist.

Mm-hmm.

And so as you can imagine, we've had a lot of differences in our backgrounds and things like that.

But throughout our relationship, we've really dove into each other's lives and learned how to celebrate our differences and have respectful conversations about them.

And there's so many ways where I really see him as the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.

But I just worry a little bit about this one big difference because it feels so fundamental.

And he's wonderful, and he is very respectful of my faith, and he'll go to church with me and things like that.

But it feels like there's something somewhat missing there, and I'm not sure how...

to tackle that issue in a respectful way to him and to his background, and also in a way that feels good to me, I guess.