A couple doesn’t get married in a vacuum.

They marry into a set of pre-existing relationships -- family and friends -- some intertwined, others separate. All these threads commingle with a couple, some pulling them closer together, while others threaten to tear them apart.

I thought about all this when I was asked to be a part of a friend’s wedding in a unique way. My friend said that she and her fiance wanted to incorporate “community vows” into their wedding festivities. At a party after the ceremony, a few selected guests would say how they believed loved ones could support or care for the couple. Another guest would then ask the whole room if they agreed to do those things, and everyone would respond, “We do.”

Their request prompted me to ask a wide cross section of people, from those who have been married for decades to those who have been divorced multiple times, about what community support for a marriage looks like. It also made me think about what people have done to support my marriage.

Here are ten ways to support a married couple:

1. Don’t take sides in a dispute. Even when complaining about their spouses, people are rarely asking for marriage advice. They often just want to vent when they are upset. It’s best to listen with empathy. Reassure them that certain disagreements and fights are normal, and be willing to share some of your own experiences as a couple and how you got past them. Don’t make it a session about how terrible marriage or spouses are.

2. Be positive about their partner. It’s not helpful to say negative things about a person’s partner, even if you don’t particularly like them. Pointing out a spouse’s positives can encourage understanding and gratitude, rather than playing into relationship drama. Couples tend to commiserate about their respective partners’ flaws (even in front of each other), and chiming in can make people focus on those flaws more.

Refrain from saying anything negative about the person’s partner unless you sense actual abuse. Emily Filmore, a relationship and spirituality writer, says, “We all have things we accept that others cannot. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong. We all have things we admire or dislike in others. Married or not.”

3. Foster real-life connections. Include the couple in your gatherings with other couples or families with kids the same age. Invite them over with other people you think would get along with each other. For close family members, invite them to dinner at least once a month to keep them rooted in family activities, but also give them the space to grow as a couple.

4. Nurture individual friendships. Help them grow together while not losing their sense of self. Marriage can lead to isolation from friends. It can be easy to let things you love doing with friends fall to the wayside, especially if your partner doesn’t share the same interests. A recently divorced friend said that she and her husband started to resent each other because they only did things with each other, neglecting their other friendships. So continue to reach out to the person individually, outside of just couples’ socializing.

5. Offer to watch their kids for an afternoon or evening. You can’t underestimate the impact a baby has on a marriage. Offering to help out with children so that couples can reconnect is a tremendous gift.

6. Find something nice to say about their kids. If you witness someone’s child in an act of kindness, let the parents know. It’s an indirect way of complimenting their parenting and a reminder of something good they’ve done together.

7. Accept that their choices can be different than yours, especially regarding forgiveness. Just because you wouldn’t have forgiven some act, doesn’t mean your friend can’t, either. All relationships are different, and what every couple needs varies. Don’t judge a couple’s relationship on what others are doing. You might not agree with how a couple lives their lives, but if they are happy and it’s working for them, give them the space to do what works.

8. Encourage professional help when needed. Those who love the new couple should not be afraid to encourage them to seek outside help, including counseling, if needed, to help get back on track. Offer any referrals, if asked. This can be especially important if you suspect the person isn’t comfortable being entirely honest with you or that they may be in an abusive situation.

9. Celebrate their successes. Take joy in their joy. Even if you can’t be physically present at a special event, you can call or send a card. These small acts of kindness reinforce that they have a team rooting for them.

10. Be available in moments of crisis and need. Life is marked with tragedies, large and small. People get sick, lose jobs or die unexpectedly. These moments can strain a marriage. Don’t abandon a couple going through a major life stressor. Continue to reach out, invite them over and offer specific, concrete ways to help in their moments of need.

The day the president signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. was eventful for my Muslim family.

For starters, it was the day my 3-year-old nephew got his “meeting.”

My sister and her husband, both attorneys, frequently mention meetings to their two preschoolers, and the word took on a certain mystique. The 3-year-old began begging for a “meeting” like it was a rare Hatchimal on sale at Target. They agreed to set up a meeting for him -- a brief conversation with a local judge -- and it was scheduled for that fateful Friday in January. Both the 2-year-old and 3-year-old got dressed in suits early that morning, the older one excitedly dancing a jig.

At the courthouse, the judge asked my nephew what he wanted for his birthday, and he said a lawn edger. (The child is obsessed with lawn care.) The courtroom laughed. Post-meeting, the boys headed to their Montessori school with an exciting tale for Show and Tell.

Meanwhile, my father was substitute teaching in an urban school district with a fair number of struggling students, as he has nearly every day since his retirement. He’s in his early 70s, and drives nearly an hour each day to sub wherever he’s needed. He came to America from Pakistan in the late ‘60s on a stroke of luck -- the winner of a visa lottery. He had aspirations to become a teacher here, but spent more than 20 years as a car salesman before buying a convenience store.

My mother helped him run that store for nearly a decade. They woke up before dawn, drove 60 miles to the store and returned home late, sometimes near midnight. She worked as a sales clerk at Macy’s after that business folded, and retired less than a year ago. Not one to sit still, she became a full-time volunteer for refugees resettling in the Houston area.

That Friday, she had already made some calls and raised grocery money for a Syrian family. She was planning her shopping for the next day, hunting for the best sales at different stores to stretch the dollars, when she got another call: A Somali family needed some help with rent this month. She’s gotten to know several refugee families -- offering to take in children when their mom was hospitalized, driving a pregnant woman to her checkups, earning the nickname “Grandma” from young kids.

They know her, and they trust her.

But her thoughts on that Friday were occupied with my youngest brother. She was waiting to hear the results of his board exams, the last hurdle before finishing medical school. She had been praying for him relentlessly, this youngest child of six, all born and raised in America. All of us are college-educated and most beyond, but none had fulfilled her dream of having a doctor in the family.

In the sixth-grade English class where my father was subbing, the students were being unruly. He talked to them the way he would lecture his own children.

“Listen, the people who really love you in this world are your parents,” he said. “They want you to learn; they think you are here in school learning, but that’s not what you’re doing right now. If you don’t keep your eyes focused on what you are supposed to be doing, you’re not going to be successful.”

They immediately changed their attitudes, settled down and got to work. It’s speeches like this that earned him the nickname “abuelo” from children he sees regularly.

He and my mom have mastered parental guilt. Children of immigrants internalize the sacrifices their parents made to give them better opportunities. It’s partly why second-generation immigrants tend to outperform their peers academically. The unspoken standard is one of trying to pay back the debt you owe to parents who left their families, their culture, their lives because they believed in something better.

Back at home, my mother offered her Friday prayers and stayed longer on the prayer mat, wondering why she hadn’t heard from my brother yet. She knew the board results were coming.

Less than an hour later, my siblings and I received a WhatsApp message from my brother, who was working at the hospital: “I passed both boards. Can someone tell mom and dad? I am in surgery.”

When I called my mom to say, “Congratulations, your son is a doctor now,” she cried.

After our call, she went back to figuring out how to divvy up the donations she had gathered among the refugee families.

The day Muslims were blocked from entering America, my family remained busy -- giving back to the country that is our home and to the people who are its greatest strength.

Sharon Ketchum went with her daughter to the nation’s capitol to spread the word of God, as she believes it, and to call for an end to abortion in the country.

While such a protest has clear political implications for the law and how it affects others, she described it as more of an emotional journey for her. It was a chance for her to bond with her 16-year-old daughter, Katelyn, who was attending the March for Life for the second time.

“This was a pilgrimage for my daughter and I,” Ketchum said. “Hearing the speakers, witnessing how many people feel the same way we do, it was a needed boost to our faith.”

The March for Life is an annual rally opposing women’s legal right to abortion as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade ruling in 1973. This year, the speakers included Vice President Mike Pence. The event came the weekend after nearly 500,000 women marched in Washington in protest of President Donald Trump and in support of women’s rights -- including access to abortion.

Ketchum and her daughter, who live in Wentzville, Missouri, left on Wednesday in a caravan of chartered buses taking thousands of St. Louis-area students to the march. The night they arrived in D.C., the group attended a program in which an energetic priest put on a show in the style of late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon. He even did a lip-sync competition with a nun.

“The kids just loved it,” Ketchum said. It got more serious when they heard from Melissa Ohden, a well-known speaker among anti-abortion activists. She speaks about her experiences as a survivor of her birth mother’s attempted abortion.

The next day, they marched from the Washington Monument to the steps of the Supreme Court building. Ketchum’s group found other students from Missouri, and they chanted: “We love babies, yes we do, we love babies, how about you?”

Thousands of teenagers and college students attend the march each year, but the discussion about abortion starts much younger for some. Ketchum said her children probably learned about it in fifth or sixth grade, when their parochial school begins teaching about puberty. Children learn about the various ways a fetus can be aborted and the church’s stance against it.

Ketchum said the ultimate goal is to end all abortions, including in the case of rape or incest, because she believes life begins at conception. This raises difficult questions, such as what to do with all the embryos created and stored for IVF treatments, but Ketchum says the larger issue is about the consequences of individual decisions.

“I don’t think it’s man’s decision that we can scientifically manufacture a baby,” she said. “It’s God’s will.”

The abortion rate in the U.S. has dipped to its lowest level since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision that legalized the procedure nationwide, according to a study released by the Guttmacher Institute. In 2014, 19 percent of pregnancies in the U.S., excluding miscarriages, ended in abortion.

About 926,200 abortions were performed nationwide in 2014, the report found, compared with 1.06 million abortions in 2011.

Better birth control access and use is a key to the declining number of abortions, said Megan Donovan, a senior policy manager at the Institute, in news reports about the study.

Ketchum said that with her own children, she wants to focus on the importance of chastity, making moral decisions and responsibility.

“Don’t ask me what I believe on contraception,” she said. “That’s not what I want to talk about. I didn’t go on this trip for the politics. I went on it because I knew it would be an awesome experience with my daughter.”

Her daughter agreed, saying that having her mother attend with her was the most meaningful part of the march. Katelyn also said seeing the large crowd of people standing up for the same issue as her was a favorite moment.

The day after the march, their group gathered in front of the White House to pray for the country and its leaders. Ketchum felt an overwhelming feeling of warmth. She said she voted for Trump because she feels it is what God wanted her to do based on Trump’s stated anti-abortion position.

“I’m trusting Trump and his administration will do what they say,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”