Messengers - 7

Theirs was not an “angel marriage”. Dylan made that point rather pointedly every time that it came up. Dylan and Molly’s friends learned quickly not to mention it, and they mostly weren’t the kind of people that would. But he got a lot of it when he did press for the book.

Part of this was Molly’s fault, he thought. When the first thing you say to someone that you actually do end up marrying is that they are supposed to marry you, well, it just brings up those kinds of thoughts.

Molly was not a hardcore evangelical type, but she was one of the people who’d come to religion because of the angels. She believed, whole heartedly, that there was a message that could be pulled from what the angels said, and that figuring it out was the path to happiness and fulfillment.

She wasn’t alone, and that had led to the whole phenomenon of angel marriages. One of the things that angels fairly commonly revealed was that you were going to meet a certain person on a certain date and that you would marry them.

Sometimes this was vague, like what Dylan heard, and sometimes they were specific, giving you the full name of the other person. Like anything else, it wasn’t predictable. But it had lead to people getting married specifically because the angels “told them to”.

Which was bullshit. For one thing, the angels destroyed at least as many marriages as they created, and probably more. A lot of marriages had a hard time weathering messages from entities unknown telling you exactly where you spouse was and what they were doing.

That actually lead to an interesting phenomenon, one that didn’t get nearly the play that the angel marriages did, where more people were cheating rather than less. You would think that, like war, people would do a lot less of it if they knew that at any time they could be exposed.

But there was a high rate of noise to signal involved. What the angels told you wasn’t always some profound message, even though people thought they were. If you were the kind of person inclined to cheat, the fact that the angels hadn’t revealed that you were going to meant that it was a good way to prove that you weren’t. It made people fearless.

That was before you considered the people that found out their husband or wife was already cheating and decided to go for it, and people that started cheating because the angels said they would. That last one particularly amused Dylan, because you almost never heard about angel affairs.