I don’t know if you caught the ABCs Australian Story program this week. A very moving program looking at two women suffering from a rare and debilitating disease called lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM for short. It strikes women of child-bearing age, attacks their lungs, and at this stage a lung transplant seems the only option for a chance at survival.

Mary—a young woman in her twenties—was one of the two featured. After diagnosis, various lung collapses and operations, a doctor told Mary that having children would be too great a risk to her health—another disappointment. Then, a couple of years after her diagnosis, Mary’s husband rang her one day to say he’d had enough—he couldn’t cope with her sickness anymore, and hated the fact they wouldn’t be able to have children or be a normal family. So Mary lost her health, the opportunity for a family and then her husband—the one person she expected would still by her thick and thin.

Mary’s family have stuck by her, thank goodness. Although one comment made in the program left me sad. Talking about Mary’s husband leaving her, one family member said, “I think [Mary] was a little bit naïve… thinking that, you know, you're there for thick and thin and for better or worse, in sickness and in health.”

Naïve? What are marriage vows for if they’re not to be believed—to be trusted? ‘For better or worse, in sickness and in health’—marriage vows are a promise. If it’s naïve to think a promise should be kept, well, call me naïve. I hope I’m naïve enough to keep the promises I made to Merryn in our marriage vows. I certainly hope she’s naïve enough to keep hers to me.

And I just hope another man walks into the life of a twenty-something woman named Mary with lung disease, and shows her how naïve he could be too.