Shall we dance?

Unpacking all of the boxes we brought with us from California yielded several surprises, among them the photos I hadn't seen in almost 5 years that were taken on our honeymoon. As I looked at them, I was struck by both how much younger we both looked. But I was even more impacted by something in my face that wasn't attributable to the weight changes I have experienced since our wedding day or my ever-increasing age. Wondering if I was alone in my observation, I asked Daniel what he saw. He said, "You... looking deliriously happy." That was it. In those photographs, I glowed.

It is pretty unreasonable to expect that I would keep the honeymoon glow for years, but even if my visage doesn't wear an expression of rapture, my heart and affections are still very much his. In quieter moments we sometimes talk about life before us. While we remember having childhoods and teenage angst and young adult lives apart, there is some part of us that can't remember what it was like to be just I without we -- like somehow we became fully ourselves when our lives joined. I sometimes struggle to even think of him as a different person, because he feels like an extension of me.

Now that we have officially made it to five years of marriage (which is, of course, just a drop in the bucket when it comes to the time we have lived and hope to live), it's amazing to reflect on how much we've grown together, and yet how much we have to discover about each other... from little things like Daniel's affection for Swedish-style pickled herring to big things like the dreams and aspirations that grow in our hearts as time goes by. So much of the learning comes by just being together and trying new things, each of us exploring paths that we've never walked together.

We've acknowledged this 5-year milestone in a variety of ways, both serious and silly. From a leisurely fondue dinner a week ago, to the bikes we bought still longer ago, reaching this time in our lives seemed reason enough to celebrate why we chose then, and why we continue to choose now, to spend our lives together.

We both had a blast today doing mostly ordinary things around town, and we found ourselves smiling a lot. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to find that my face wears traces of that old glow tonight, because so many little things reminded me today of why I was so happy to marry Daniel five years ago. Not that I had forgotten... but sometimes when the rest of life has me preoccupied, I simply forget to remember. I was also reminded that while I have spent every day of the last 5 years in Daniel's presence, there are always opportunities to learn more about him and to find even more reasons to love him dearly.

Among our discoveries today was the fact that we can have a great deal of fun together on a dance floor. We haven't tried it since we danced at our wedding reception. Tonight we attended a Carolina Shag lesson and then took those new steps together around the room, figuring out how to make the eight prescribed footfalls work in our own unique way.

It's no accident that partner dances are so often pointed to as metaphors for marriage. If you are lucky, you start with a partner you like, some basic instructions and a bit of encouragement from those more experienced in the dance. But when the music begins, it's all you... and you can work together in spite of the missteps and stumbles, striving to keep in step with one another and the music, or you can work at cross-purposes and lose the connection that makes the dance a partnership, perhaps even leaving the floor before the dance is over. In those magic moments when the dancers genuinely connect, the synchronicity is absolutely beautiful to watch and intensely satisfying, but for most of us, getting there takes countless hours and weeks and years of work, and it's so easy to tire while the music still plays.

As for me... well, I'm still struggling with the steps, and I am rotten at following a lead. I certainly haven't figured out the fancy spins and turns, and I'm a long way from the national championships. But today as on this day five short years ago, when Daniel asks me to dance, the answer is yes... because whatever the dance, there is no partner whose hand I would rather hold.