The Vow That Outlasts Memory: What One Marriage Teaches About Love as Daily Choice

When Claudia Celis was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 44, the question facing her husband José Ignacio was not whether he still felt in love — but whether he would keep choosing to love. His answer, offered to ACI Prensa, cuts through a culture that treats affection as something that happens to us rather than something we decide: “Love is a decision. Love is not a feeling. Love is a decision, and you have to decide to love every day.”

Married in 1999 at St. Engracia Parish in Monterrey, the couple built nearly three decades of shared projects and family life before illness rewrote the terms. José Ignacio describes himself not first as a romantic, but as “a child of God who has found answers to many questions along the way, precisely through suffering.”

His witness reframes Catholic marriage as a promise not conditioned on things going well — a vocation aimed at heaven, renewed in exhaustion and uncertainty. For anyone seeking wisdom about lasting love, his testimony suggests the deepest devotion is not the one we feel, but the one we choose again each morning.