Stacy + Mark

I have never witnessed such an intimate first dance in a room filled with people. And there wasn’t even a dance floor.

Stacy and Mark clung to one another right next to the long table of seated guests, moving and swaying and singing along to the words of their song as if they were the only two people in the whole wide world. At first the conversations of their loved ones carried on but gradually as the soft sweet words of their love song spread, a hush spread with them.

Watching them, there were two unmistakable things you could see: Stacy and Mark are truly in love and they have a deep appreciation for that love. I see the latter in couples who have been married before or found love later in life quite often. I am drawn to it. It gives me hope for my own love story and it gives me hope that they will make it. Marriage is hard, it is no secret. Hey, life is hard! But when you recognize the value of what you have you fight for it, you don’t give up and I believe you also feel the joyful times more. Look at Stacy and Mark, for more than a week leading up to their wedding, Mark left Stacy a message on their bathroom mirror counting down the days until they’d become husband and wife.

A friend of mine recently commented to me that weddings are contrived. I vehemently disagreed. And then I thought about it. Cake cuttings, first dances, assigning bridesmaids and groomsmen an order to walk down the aisle, those things are not organic. What makes me love weddings, what I think makes us all love weddings are the moments that are natural, raw and real, moments like Stacy and Mark’s first dance.

Everyone in the room last night felt what I was feeling. Everyone hoped a little more for their own lives. Everyone I daresay believed a little more in love and all the possibilities that life has to offer. These are reminders we need.

Thank you Stacy and Mark.