If religion is really important to either one of you, you will find someone who shares it to marry and make kids with. This is not a trivial, background issue.
The PP was right, everything changes when you have kids. What happens when your first son is born, and he reneges on the Catholic baptism, wants a bris, and looks forward to a Bar Mitzvah? (Although, he would have to put the child through a formal conversion, which a bris would be part of, as the mother must be Jewish for the child to be considered Jewish.) What happens when he tells your children that Jesus is not the Messiah, and that the Messiah has not come yet? What happens when you tell the children that the Jews are wrong, that Jesus was not only the Messiah, but the Son of God? The Pharisees, the keepers of Jewish law, engineered Jesus’ crucifixion because he called himself God’s Son and said he could forgive sins! (This is not anti-Semitic “the Jews killed Jesus” stuff. Just pointing out what happened in the Bible.)
You said you would not convert because your faith is so important to you. Well, if it’s that important, you should build a family with that faith at its center. A lot of times in these situations where the parents are different religions, the children end up growing up with NO faith. And that’s not good for anyone.
Love, by itself, is not enough to make an exclusive lifetime union work. Compatibility in other areas is important, and religion is the biggest and most vital of those. Often, young single people will claim their religion is not important enough to refuse marriage to someone of a different faith. BUT when children are born, people usually have a strong desire to reconnect with the things that were important in their childhood. The desire for tradition, stability, and supportive community surface, and most people look to the faith community they were raised with for those things. Suddenly, those young single people who really didn’t care about their religion realize how important it is to them, and that they do not want to let go of it, regardless of what they said at the time of marriage. Then, religious war in the household, whether outright and declared, or subtle and quiet.
Shared faith is such a cornerstone of my own marriage. We would not be as united, stable, happy, or compatible as we are without it.
