Our daughter got married this weekend and so, naturally, I want to tell a love story. Weddings are most always a love story about the bride and groom. But this is not quite the love story you think it is.

I want to tell you about how beautiful she was in her Art Deco-inspired, fitted gown and cathedral-length veil. This little girl who used to wear leotards as pants. I want to tell you about how the sun peeked through the clouds — on a day they’d been calling for rain — shining between the trees that bordered the tule-covered arbour where the bride and groom held hands and looked starry-eyed at each other.

And I want to tell you what it was like to watch her come down the aisle with her dad — the ex-husband I had never imagined for myself — and how every atom of love I’ve ever felt for her rushed from my heart to my throat at the sight of them arm in arm. My mind flashed to that day, when she was about two, and he was lifting her high in the air above the waves at the beach. They were silhouetted against the backdrop of the setting sun. The photograph I took of that moment, now pressed onto the back of his tie for this day, by the bride. Theirs was always a kind of love story too, I thought.

She took the hands of her groom then. And I found myself looking at the sky, sending up a wish that no matter what challenges or trials life gives the two of them, that they will remember the feel of their hands together on this day — in this moment. That when they need stability in their lives, the solid thing they’ll seek to hold onto will be each other.

I hoped those things for them on this first day of their new life together — and I’ll hope for them every day after. I’ve come to think that weddings, more than anything, are about hope. Two people come together in front of everyone they love, and dare to hope that they’ll spend a lifetime together. It takes courage to hope together. It takes courage to hope — and to love — with all your heart.

As our wedding guests wrapped up dessert, her dad and I went to the podium to offer a welcome to our new son-in-law — who has felt like family for so long already. Admittedly, as the divorced parents of the bride, we were unsure what we could say to her and her new husband on their wedding day that wouldn’t somehow feel hollowed out by a divorce that, at one time, shredded the muscles of our hearts so that it felt like they could barely beat without a struggle.

So, we decided to say the only thing we could say. That, from that struggle, we learned something about the courage it takes to love with all your heart — and to never be sorry that you did.

So, through tears, we wished for them a love that lets them each grow and heal and be loved in a way that encourages them to become better versions of themselves. A love that holds their flaws lightly, and has forgiveness at its core. A love that’s both a shelter and a shield. Where their deepest fears and sorrows and truths can be shared and understood. A love that doesn’t care who they are, or what they have, but that exists for no other reason than that it cannot be stopped. The kind of love that can withstand anything — even what the world will tell them it can’t.

I know, you don’t hear a lot of people acknowledging their divorce at a wedding. I guess this isn’t the love story anyone expected to hear on Saturday, but it’s the only one we know. And it’s the one we needed to tell. On one of the most meaningful days of their lives, we wanted our kids to start their married life knowing what we seemed only able to recognize and understand in hindsight.

That love is messy. And the work to go on and become the person you will next become — and the person after that, and the person after that — is messy. That the effort to find forgiveness for each other, but mostly for yourself, will feel colossal — and will also be colossally messy — at times. And that everyone wants a soulmate that’s a perfect fit. But mostly they’ll be a mirror — reflecting back to you everything that’s holding you back. Bringing you to your own attention so that you can change your life.

Those are things that marriage can teach you. But mostly, they’re just the things that love will teach you.

The wedding speech was an unwitting acknowledgement of that — of this notion that, through love, we may have lost but we have also gained. We lost the world we once loved as it was, but we gained a deeper awareness of the power of love and grace and forgiveness in our lives. And we’re creating something new with it.

We had no idea what a full circle moment delivering that speech would be.

Behind every beautiful thing, there is some kind of pain. Rarely, can you see the horizon in the distance, or that ruin is the road to transformation, when you’re in the middle of that pain and ruin. You can only find a way to continue to live in hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. For so long, I know I lived in a kind of hope for the future, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides.

On Saturday night, walking away from that podium, I knew that love and hope have delivered. And so have we. We are creating that hopeful future.

It would be easy to say, because we’re divorced, that love wasn’t enough to get us through everything we faced together. But just maybe it was the only thing that got us through. Love allowed us to keep hope all these years for what could be. Love pushed us to do the work. Love was our only hope.

And that seemed like the perfect wedding message to send.

Love was our only hope.

Love is the only hope.