Last June, instead of a rehearsal dinner the night before our wedding, Scott and I hosted a rooftop comedy roast for his soon-to-be-amputated right foot. One by one, our friends took turns walking up to the mic, wiping it down and removing their masks before making jokes about my fiancé’s doomed appendage.

“At least for the rest of your life,” said our friend Tank, “everything you do will be considered ‘brave.’”

A few months earlier, as coronavirus cases started to rise and people began hoarding toilet paper, Scott had ankle pain that wouldn’t go away. When physical therapy didn’t help, he got an M.R.I. Inconclusive results led to a PET scan.

After his first visit with the orthopedic oncologist, Scott stood in our newly outfitted home office in our small San Francisco apartment and said, “She told me if it’s a bone tumor, I’ll need surgery.”

“We can handle that,” I said. “Plenty of people have ankle surgery, right?”

“Surgery,” he said, “means amputation.”

After multiple biopsies over many weeks (Scott said he felt as if he were an Ikea desk being drilled into), his doctor called to deliver the diagnosis. We pulled off the highway and put her on speakerphone. It was osteosarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer that afflicts some 800 Americans a year. It appeared to have spread. The five-year survival rate for multifocal osteosarcoma is 30 percent.

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After we hung up, Scott — vegan, athlete, artificial intelligence engineer, the kind of person who adds turmeric to all his food — took my hand. Together for five years, we were only 32.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve never been below the top 30 percent for anything. But if something happens to me, I want to make sure you’re taken care of. Let’s get married now.”

We scheduled Scott’s below-the-knee amputation for 10 days later, a Monday. Our friends announced they were throwing us a wedding in Golden Gate Park the day before the surgery.

I wanted a wedding celebration, even if it was last-minute, so we could mark the occasion with more than just the administrative staff of the county clerk. Scott, however, wanted something more in line with his arid sense of humor: a foot roast. That’s how we ended up gathered on a roof telling amputation jokes and making bad puns about Scott getting “cold feet” before the wedding.

The next day we stood, masked and socially distanced, in Golden Gate Park with our closest friends, gathered at a week’s notice. I looked at Scott, handsome in his navy suit, noting that this was the last day he would fill it out with two legs and two feet.

Twenty-four hours later, I met him in the postoperative recovery room. He grinned a goofy, Fentanyl-fueled smile, but it faded as the drugs wore off and what he called the “Civil War pain” of his surgery kicked in. Soon the hospital’s Covid-19 visitor restrictions forced me to leave, and I stole one last glance at the space in the bed where the bottom of his leg had been.

When I unpacked Scott’s suitcase at home, I discovered his right shoe rolled up in a trash bag. Upset about that and all of the right shoes he would no longer need, I collected every one and shoved them into the back of the closet.

After our honeymoon (spent on the seventh floor of the hospital, followed by my mother-in-law moving into the apartment next door for two weeks), we received more bad news: The other suspicious spots meant he would have to undergo six cycles of intensive chemotherapy, during which he would need to live in the hospital. Two major surgeries would also be required to remove the lesions.

We faced the hardest year of our lives. Covid precautions would make it hard for friends or family to help or even visit, and the hospital would only allow Scott a single visitor per day. I looked into the future and saw night after night of coming home to an empty apartment, numbing myself with pizza and Netflix, and thought: We can’t do this by ourselves.

We tried to soldier on but struggled. One afternoon, our good friends Kristen and Phil visited us in our backyard; for the first time, they understood the gravity of what we were dealing with.

Not long after, they invited us to their place in Oakland for an outdoor dinner, but “their place” requires some explanation. A couple of years earlier, they founded a co-owned community called Radish, where a dozen or so people in their 20s and 30s live together. Most have their own one-bedroom apartment, but they share food expenses, cooking responsibilities and an outdoor space with a hot tub, fire pit and hammock. These days, they were working from home and following extremely strict Covid protocols.

As a researcher who studies romantic relationships, I have always been intrigued by this kind of arrangement. Modern couples expect to get all of their needs met by one romantic partner, but that can put a lot of pressure on the relationship. In 2015, a team of psychologists, led by Elaine Cheung, found that relying on different people for discrete needs leads to happier relationships. Eli Finkel, another psychologist, coined a name for them: OSOs (Other Significant Others).

An OSO can be a friend or family member who fulfills a need that your significant other cannot: a triathlete who exercises with you because your partner doesn’t, or a sibling you call to vent about work because your significant other hates corporate politics. This web of support is not new, but for many of us it has been lost.

For couples to survive and thrive, they need OSOs. That’s especially true during nightmarish years like the one Scott and I faced, which was exacerbated by the pandemic separating us from our normal network of support.

That evening, as we sat at a picnic table at Radish, one of the residents brought out roasted asparagus, a salad topped with seeds and berries, and a platter of sweet potatoes — a stark contrast to all that cold pizza and hospital food. As I ate and laughed, I felt happy and relaxed for the first time in months.

When we got into the car to drive home, I said to Scott, “We should move here.”

Scott and I are career-driven professionals. Living in a commune had not exactly been our life plan. Then again, none of this had been. So we adjusted. And after months of losses, we finally got a win: Radish had a one-bedroom, first-floor apartment opening up. Three weeks later we moved in.

Life at Radish has felt like turning on the lights after months of living in the dark. My new, bigger family and I have cooked elaborate dinners, commiserated about challenging co-workers and spent hours wilting in the hot tub.

Scott was still mostly confined to the hospital, but for me, instead of returning home from visits to a pizza-stained rug, I was welcomed with hugs and tea. And Scott got regular visits from many more significant others than me.

One rare Sunday morning when Scott was back home, I jumped into the shower before he woke up. There, against the stark white of the porcelain, were clumps of short red hair. I cleaned them up and crawled back into bed, where he turned to me, half-asleep, and said, “My hair is falling out.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want the nurses to shave it off with a dull razor,” he said. In the morning, he would be returning to the hospital for another week of chemo.

I’d had the strength to push through the foot roast and last-minute wedding, but something about his hair falling out really broke me, perhaps because I love his red hair so much. So I texted the group, and within minutes we decided to create a hair-shaving ceremony.

That evening, Misha D.J.ed songs from the musical “Hair” while Lauren ran a slide show of sexy bald men behind him. We all took turns shaving Scott’s head, moving through a series of faux hawks and mohawks before it all disappeared.

Hearing Scott laugh, I knew we would make it. I had known, in theory, about the importance of having OSOs in your life, but now I was surviving thanks to them.

One morning not long ago, when I was poaching eggs in the communal kitchen, Scott texted: “Where are my right shoes?”

I hadn’t imagined he would ever need them again, but of course he would, for his prosthetic. His first fitting was in the morning. Our housemate, Alex — who, unlike me, is a sports hardware engineer — had signed up to take him.

Logan Ury is the director of relationship science at Hinge. Her first book, “How to Not Die Alone,” will be published in February.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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