The First Year

The first year of marriage is supposed to be about adjustment: learning how someone else loads the dishwasher, discovering incompatible sleep temperatures, negotiating whose turn it is to admit the laundry isn’t going to fold itself. That narrative never quite fit for me. Not because the year has been effortless—it hasn’t—but because what has felt most striking is not the friction of two lives colliding, but the quiet astonishment of realizing that a life I never quite expected has, somehow, arrived.

I did not grow up imagining marriage as inevitable. My parents’ marriage was rocky, and I watched it fall apart as I entered young adulthood, learning early that love does not guarantee permanence. Later, as an attorney, I sat with people in the midst of divorce—witnessing promises unravel, anger flare, and disappointments stretch across years. None of it made marriage look particularly aspirational. By the time I became a rabbi, I stopped telling my life story as one that necessarily led to marriage—not out of bitterness, but from a quiet, sober realism. I imagined a life differently, one that could be full and meaningful even without a partner.

And then, somehow, we found each other.

We’ve now been married a year, and what surprises me most is not the change, but the rightness. The way this life fits. The way I wake up most mornings and feel not the thrill of novelty, but the steadiness of belonging. Not the dizzy happiness of a honeymoon, but the deeper comfort of recognition.

We live in Oregon, where the winter light moves softly across the walls and the air smells like wet earth. Spring is definitely in the air. Our mornings are usually quiet. Sometimes he’s already awake, sometimes I am. There is coffee, always. There are dishes in the sink, errands we keep meaning to run. Ordinary life. And yet inside that ordinariness is something that still feels faintly miraculous: I am not alone in this house. Not metaphorically. Literally. There is another human being whose breathing has become part of the background music of my days.

I love watching my husband do the most mundane things, which feels embarrassing to admit—and which is how I know it’s true. I love the way he drinks a beer, thoughtful and unhurried. I love watching him make something in the kitchen, not because he’s trying to impress anyone, but because he’s genuinely absorbed in the process. I love listening to him play music—piano, clarinet, singing to himself around the house. Sometimes I’ll be in another room and hear him practicing, and I feel something in my chest soften, as if the house itself is being gently tuned.

I love the way he holds me. Not just physically, though that matters too, but emotionally. The way he listens when I talk something through for the tenth time. The way he doesn’t always try to fix things, but doesn’t disappear either. There is something special in being witnessed that consistently, without fanfare.

Marriage, this first year, has not felt like becoming someone new. It has felt like becoming more fully myself.

There’s a story people like to tell when someone marries in midlife: that this is about patience rewarded, about finally finding what you were searching for all along. That story is too tidy. The truth feels stranger and more honest. I don’t experience this marriage as something that arrived “late.” It arrived when it arrived. It feels less like a prize and more like the unfolding of a story I couldn’t have outlined ahead of time.

Some things just happened. We met. We kept talking. We kept choosing each other. There wasn’t a checklist being completed or a careful calculus of compatibility. There was something quieter instead: trust growing where I hadn’t expected it to, softness emerging where I’d grown used to being guarded.

That feels worth naming honestly. Not the fairy tale, but the humility of it. The way love didn’t arrive with fireworks but with consistency. 

There have been hard moments, of course. Two adults with long histories don’t merge lives seamlessly. Habits clash. Misunderstandings happen. There are conversations that require slowing down, apologizing, and trying again. That, too, is part of building a life together.

What feels most profound is the way marriage has changed my internal landscape. I feel less vigilant, less alone with the weight of decisions. There is now a “we” that exists not just in theory but in practice. When something difficult happens—a hard day, a piece of bad news, an old ache—I don’t hold it all by myself anymore. I place it into the space between us, where it becomes something we carry together.

As a rabbi, I often think about brit, or covenant. I give sermons about the idea that holiness lives not in perfection but in commitment. This year has turned that teaching into lived experience. Covenant is when, half-asleep, I reach for my husband and find him there. Covenant is the daily choice to stay emotionally available, even when it would be easier to retreat.

There is grief inside this joy, too. Grief for the years when I assumed this might not happen. Grief for earlier versions of myself who built a full life while quietly carrying the sense that something was missing. Sometimes I feel tenderness toward those selves. She wasn’t wrong; She wasn’t broken. She was just walking the path she had.

Marriage hasn’t erased my independence. It’s reframed it. I’m still myself: a rabbi, a teacher, a writer, a woman with strong opinions and a deep inner life. But now I am also someone’s wife—not in a shrinking way, but in an expanding one. There is another person rooting for me intimately, invested in my wellbeing in the small, daily ways that matter most. That kind of accompaniment subtly changes how the world feels.

If I had to name what this first year has taught me, it would be this: love is less about intensity and more about attentiveness. It is less about grand declarations and more about persistence. It is a distinct dance: the choreography of two lives learning to move alongside each other.

Sometimes at night, as we’re falling asleep, I listen to my husband’s breathing and feel something close to disbelief. Perhaps it is a sense of wonder— because despite my doubts, life still had this in store for me. 

Marriage, I am discovering, is not about losing oneself. It is about the quiet power of being seen, held, and accompanied. It is about realizing that a shared life is built not from grand milestones but from hundreds of small moments: coffee cups, half-finished conversations, music drifting down the hallway, hands finding each other in the dark.