Getting married in Brazil?

When I told friends in Brazil I was going to marry a woman from California, there was frequently a look of stunned disbelief. They said things like, "With all these gorgeous Brazilian women around, you are going to marry an American?"

Just as an example, here is the woman who helped make girls from Ipanema famous, Astrud Gilberto, who sang on one of the best albums in the world, bossa nova Getz/Gilberto (Stan Getz and João Gilberto).

It was not only that many Brazilian women were indeed gorgeous, lively and fun, the idea of literally marrying into a culture I really liked was very appealing. I know many great marriages that started that way, and it certainly is a way to learn a lot more about the culture really fast.

However. But. I had just come out of a busted first marriage that fell apart over a lack of shared values and goals, and even less tangible lack of shared styles of dealing with problems, family culture types issues, what seems normal to you to do when things get rough (which they always do at some point). Plenty of initial mutual attraction and common interests, but lack of agreement on deeper commonalities (or lack of them) that aren't always obvious when the hormones get rolling.

So I was also feeling gun-shy and cautious. I sort of blamed my own past, particularly the Mormon Church, which my first wife had joined because I was a member. Partially to make me happy, but partially because she had her own deep push/pull, attraction/avoidance thing with religion. So I arrived in Rio determined to be secular for a while, try out some new things. I was also a relatively well off, decent looking, young (26) single American diplomat with an apartment in Ipanema (see last post). Hog heaven, right?

Briefly.

It did not take long to figure out that dating sort of exasperated me, not to mention the usual anxieties, hurt feelings, misunderstandings, etc. I really wanted someone to build something with long term. And I began to realize that I really was not only Mormon on a pretty deep level, but also a pretty specialized one, intellectual, left-leaning, etc. Small pool, especially in Brazil, which had a lot fewer Mormons at the time than it does now. None of the local Mormon girls in Rio or Brasilia fit that description, or that might have been an interesting option.

So I thought back to Stanford, where I had done my undergrad studies, where intellectual, left-leaning Mormons actually tend to congregate. Blazing quickly to mind was one Sandy Ballif, who I had met while I was engaged to my first wife, so we had just become really good buddies. So I arranged my one all-time great bureaucratic coup, and got the diplomatic service to send me back to the states for a month or so, so I could do some research for a project for them, propose a dissertation topic back in Boston, and spend some time at Stanford.

Which went so well that Sandy and I ended up married a little over a year later (after she had made her own doctoral research Fulbright pilgrimage to Iceland to learn Old Norse). And I even finished a dissertation a few years later on the topic proposed on that trip.

That compresses a lot of interesting history, so, gentle reader, we will will probably be back to some of it later.