Terrible Dancers Can Still Be The Best Partners

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.”― Amy Bloom

The dance that began it all!

This is the quote that was plastered on all two-hundred plus programs handed out at my wedding and that still hangs on the wall in a shadow box. I loved it then and I love it now but for very different reasons. You see, the girl that put that on her wedding program and the woman who reads it now are two very different people. I thought I knew marriage then and now I’ve lived marriage. 
That will change you.

It wasn’t conscious at the time but I believe that young girl put that lovely quote on there because it seemed wise and as if it proclaimed that her new husband and her had the skills necessary for the never-ending dance they were vowing. We thought we were perfectly paired and would make a great team but the truth is there was little balance to be found back then. Not for lack of wanting it but because we were standing on an unsteady foundation. Little did we realize that we were trying to build a home , a life, a marriage on quicksand made of selfishness, faulty ideas on what marriage was “supposed” to be, ideas we derived from society’s standards and fairy tales we’d mistaken for reality. 

We thought we’d waltz away into our happily ever after just like that. We had no idea we were two-left-feet clumsy fools 'dancing' on unsteady ground. Ironically enough, after a year of planning every last detail of our wedding day, I actually have a vivid memory of when we were in the limo going from the ceremony to the reception and I realized we’d never practiced our first dance and panicked! Turns out what I hadn't thought of in that moment and what I really should have been panicking about was that the same was true for our new married life. We never did practice, heck we hadn’t even read the official rules, signed up for a "beginner's class" or thought about asking for help. 

Nope, we thought we were stellar dancers. The naivety of it all makes me giggle now, we had no idea that if marriage was really like a dance as our favorite quote claimed it to be, we didn’t have the same rhythm, danced to different beats and to make matters worse we completely forgot to invite our dance instructor into our marriage, we were doomed! Yet we expected to make it to the finals. We didn’t think that was farfetched at all. 

Thankfully we know better now, we've been dancing for almost 12 years but I gotta be honest we alone would still suck!  In the beginning we would have for sure lost every event we ever entered. We blamed one another, thought about quitting, never 'dancing' again. Heck if I am telling the truth, there have even been times when both partners haven’t been 'all in' at the same time and the dance floor is a scary place to be alone. It took us being down and out, bruised and broken, the dance floor practically crumbling beneath us before we even admitted we needed an instructor. 

We finally reached out and got Him and He is who has helped us realize the potential within ourselves and one another. Once we asked God to be on our team, finally realizing He would provide us with the steady foundation we needed and all of the details on how to dance with one another to the very end, we began to really perform and this time we couldn't care less if we won a thing or who was watching, we were dancing for joy!  

Our saving grace is and will always be our 'instructor.' We are human, we will always step on each other's toes and fall down here and there. There have been and will always be some flat out disastrous moments and yet my faith in Him remains and tells me that despite all of that we will succeed. We will make it to the finals, because we both consistently want to learn, we show up for the lessons and we put in the hard work. 

All of this being said I would like to change that original quote. 

“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partnerS. (PLURAL)” - Kelly Zarle 

One should be willing and the other should be GOD. 

It can be that simple. 

We complicate it. 

Choose wisely. 

Still dancing! 

Side note - in the interest of keeping it real - I told my husband although I believe in everything I wrote I also think that some days it’d be easier to dance with a paraplegic. No offense to the paraplegics of the world but I don’t think they win many dance contests and some days it isn't easy being married, so you get my analogy. ;) 

Bonus thought -  we're training up these future dance stars!
They will hopefully make a great Husband & Wife to two lucky people one day
because of the example all 3 of us in this marriage are setting.