Mary  Neal
Gove
Nichols

1847 - New York City

Mary had developed a successful hydropathic practice..... Hiram, despite his continual distant slander, had become to Mary more of an ugly symbol of male dominance than an immediate threat.  Mary had lived half of her life. 

...The reality of Hiram both postponed and ensured this union (Mary Gove and Thomas Nichols).  Because Mary admitted to having left her husband, the State of Massachusetts has granted a "Legal Separation for Voluntary Abandonment," but this designation did not allow either Hiram or Mary to remarry.  As the victim of abandonment, only Hiram had the clear right to sue for divorce; and Mary doubted this would happen, for Quakers did not sanction divorce.  The chains of this marriage did not stop her affair with Thomas, but they did enforce limits.  Mary resolved that she would wait a full year before moving in with Thomas and abandoning all respect for appearances or law. 

...A few months passed .  And then, a miracle.  Mary learned that Hiram had fallen in love with another woman and that he wanted a divorce.  Suddenly, unexpectedly, Mary was free. 

Wrote Mary to Thomas, "In a  marriage with you, I resign no right of my soul.  In enter into no compact to be faithful to you.  I only promise to be faithful to the deepest love in my heart.  If that love is yours, it will bear fruit for you...If my love leads me from you, I must go... I must keep my name... the name I have made for myself, through labor and suffering...I must have my room, into which none can come , but because I wish it."

They decided on a Swedenborgian ceremony.  Swedenborg articulated a theory of conjugial love that both Mary and Thomas valued.  Swedenborg's church taught that a deeper love existed than the pretense typically expressed by traditional marriage - an eternal, spiritual union of souls so profound that it transcended death.

Because so many unfortunate people married under the mistaken impression that they found conjugial love, Swedenbrog argued for the freedom to divorce and remarry - a tenet obviously important to Mary and Thomas.
p.125-127, Shameless.