A Friend from law school called me last spring in Chicago to tell me he and his girlfriend were getting married. "That's great," I responded. "When's the wedding?"

"In July," He said, "and we'd like you to marry us."

I was completely taken aback. I'm not a clergyman. But my friend explained that, by the time of the ceremony he and his fiancee already would have had a civil service.

Still, what would I possibly say in the sermon? The bride and groom had been involved in a committed, mature relationship for a number of years. I, meanwhile, am a veteran of several failed ones.

I struggled with this dilemma for weeks. Then, on a hot evening last June, I took an unusual route home from work and happened to walk past the spare, Mies van der Rohe-designed building containing the little apartment my parents moved into not long after they wed. This led me to reflect on the nature of their nearly 35-year marriage, and a conversation I once had with my father.

My father loves to travel, but for many years my mother had a fear of flying, so when I was growing up we never flew anywhere. Once I began to take trips on my own, I noticed my father was keenly interested in my travels. He always had many questions on my return, questions that reflected the fact that he'd read all about the places I'd visited and would have loved to explore them himself. It saddened me that my mother's fear of flying had kept him from seeing the world. One day, as he was driving me to the airport for a trip to yet another country he'd only imagined, I told him so.

"You shouldn't worry," he said. "Listen, it's not so easy to fly with your mother."

As I contemplated his response, what struck me was his assumption that he would never take a vacation anywhere without her. The desire to do so simply wasn't there. And it became clear that what some people might have regarded as a sacrifice was nothing of the sort to him. For my father, it would be impossible to enjoy a significant experience if he were unable to share it with my mother. Whenever he had to go to a conference at a beautiful resort so distant that it required leaving her behind, That was a sacrifice. I recalled he'd always hated to be separated from her for even a day.

When I arrived home from that walk that June night, I called my parents for confirmation of something I already knew intuitively: The last time a day went by without the two of them communicating with each other, at least by phone, John F. Kennedy was president.

These reflections yielded a variety of insights into the kind of all-enveloping love a flourishing relationship requires. It occurred to me that love alone, while necessary, is not always sufficient for attaining the type of spiritually rewarding marriage I wished for the bride and groom. I thought of many couples I knew who had an enduring admiration, respect and even love for each other, but did not have a richly fulfilling life together. I recalled a couple I knew who loved each other even as they divorced. I'd never given their situation much thought, but it was now apparent that their union had been unsuccessful because they did not have what I came to think of as a transformative love: For them, sacrifices made by one for the other were regarded as... sacrifices.

Ultimately, I recognized that, although I could not instruct my friends on the fundamentals of a successful relationship, I could relate the hope they would share a love wherein sacrifices would be transformed into opportunities. Opportunities to express their love and, in the process, nurture it and foster its continued growth. In my mind, I contrasted the divorced couple with another I know of: The husband in that marriage shaved his head to be as close as possible to his wife when cancer treatments claimed her hair. Their example dramatically illustrates the fact that times of adversity allow couple to explore the true nature of their commitment.

"My hope," I told the bride and groom as I concluded the sermon, "is that when difficult circumstances force each of you to search the very depths of your hearts, you will discover there, waiting, the soul of the other. And that you will find peace and fulfillment as such moments engender an abiding belief that it ever was and ever will be so for as long as you live on this Earth."

It has become an axiom in our culture that my generation (I'm 29) is more serious about sustaining long-term relationships than our parents were. But my contemporaries frequently complain of the difficulty of forming such bonds in the absence of worthy models. I can report to them a vision of where they might begin the journey. It looks like a small apartment in a Mies van der Rohe-designed building on the North Side of Chicago. And you don't need to be able to fly to get there. In fact, it helps if you can't.

By Maxwell R. Rovner, USA Weekend Feb 6-8, 1998.