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........

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