Tuesday February 14, 2006 // By Sandy
One big happy
Here you see a picture of Sarah with three of our family (or family-ish) members.
On the left is my sister Lilli. On the right is Nurit, Sarah’s sister-in-law, and thus my sister-in-law-to-be, once Sarah and I marry. Next to her is Jed, my brother-in-law-to-be (once he and my sister [get engaged and then] marry), and thus Sarah’s brother-in-law-to-be-to-be.
There are very few occasions at which Jed and Nurit would have occassion to meet, despite living mere miles apart. One is a situation like this, where Sarah and I visit Brooklyn and arrange a family brunch. Standing there, I realized it was a preview of one of my favorite aspects of the wedding: that Sarah and I will bring widely disparate elements of our family and friends together to break bread and drink wine and dance. Sometimes, amid the harried preparation it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees, that the point of all this is to get all of our loved ones in one place to celebrate. At every wedding I’ve been to, the bride and groom announce to the crowd how wonderful it is to see everyone together in one place, and I think up to now the full resonance of this line has been lost on me. As we plan our own party, I’m beginning to understand how cool it’ll be.
There’s no popular English term to describe the relationship, and Ann Landers once claimed there is no familial tie. But clearly, it’s useful to describe the connection more concisely than “my sister-in-law’s husband.”
In India, the term “co-brother” signifies the relationship. This is an appropriate compound because it indicates the sense of a shared responsibility. That is, two people who have married siblings and now have some fidelity to that common family.