By Michelle Formanczyk

Last night, I came into the living room and noticed something peculiar.

The blue X on our floor had turned red.

My husband had originally made it with painter’s tape. Now it was electrical tape, and it had migrated about twelve inches.

Given my professional background with adhesives, I had thoughts.

Oh, I had thoughts.

But something told me this wasn’t a battle worth picking.

Thank goodness I listened.

Because I would have missed the entire point.

Instead, I got curious.

Why had my husband changed this X three times?

You see, Steve has this wonderful habit of wanting things to be just right for me. There’s people-pleasing, and then there’s marriage, and sometimes those two look an awful lot alike.

But isn’t part of loving someone wanting to please them? Isn’t it wonderful to know there’s somebody who goes out of his way, regularly, just to see you smile?

Speaking from firsthand experience, it feels exquisite.

And I do my very best to reciprocate.

In fact, if there’s any competition in our marriage, I suspect it’s over who can love the other more. Who can find the words, the gestures, the ridiculous little surprises that capture the radiant, prismatic beauty of something neither of us possesses individually.

Something that exists only because there’s an us.

Which brings me back to the X.

Steve has had this idea for a while that we should learn to dance together.

I absolutely love this idea.

Now, as someone who regularly jokes about being born left-handed, blonde, and Polish, I tend to make a spectacle of my questionable coordination. Usually somewhere around October, when I’m claiming my white-girl pumpkin spice latte and whatever dignity I have left.

But here’s the thing.

Rhythm finds me the second my husband touches me.

Everything else fades away. The noise, the uncertainty, the world outside our embrace. There’s a rhythm that belongs to us, and I don’t have to think about where to find it.

So, while you probably won’t find me enthusiastically signing up for public dance lessons, learning to dance with my husband in our living room?

Abso-Smurfn’-lutely.

And Steve wasn’t just talking about it.

He put it on the calendar.

He made the X on the floor.

He made adjustments.

And when the appointed time came and I wasn’t quite ready, he didn’t interpret that as a lack of interest. He didn’t sit there waiting to see whether I’d show up, or quietly decide it must not matter to me.

He came and found me.

Hey, are we doing this?

Such a small thing.

And such an enormous one.

Because how many times do we put something on the calendar with every intention of following through, only to watch the time come and go?

Not because nobody cares.

Sometimes it’s because everybody cares, but nobody actually owns making it happen.

Steve owned this.

Not in a controlling way. Not with expectations about how enthusiastically I needed to respond or how promptly I needed to appear.

He simply kept making room for something he wanted us to experience together.

And I showed up.

We found a salsa tutorial. Thirty-eight minutes long.

We spent most of our evening rewinding the first two.

I practiced the footwork from the couch. Eventually, we stood up, found our places, and gave it a go.

Now, I have some dance experience. It’s been probably twenty years since I took a class, but I’ve learned choreography, practiced footwork, and danced with partners before.

I’m also the woman who wanders around the house doing ridiculous dances for absolutely no reason.

Looking foolish in my living room doesn’t particularly concern me.

But there’s something different about learning to dance at 49.

Living with vestibular migraine has changed my relationship with some of the simplest things I used to take for granted.

Left and right, for example.

You might be surprised how much confidence you can lose when you have to stop and double-check which direction is left.

Yes, even at 49.

Yes, even when you know perfectly well what left means.

And yes, even when you’re the person who has spent a professional lifetime helping other people learn new things.

There’s a peculiar vulnerability in having to question yourself over something so basic. Add movement, rhythm, coordination, and another person relying on you to find your footing?

Well, there’s plenty of room for insecurity to sneak in.

But this was our living room.

And this was Steve.

And we were dancing.

I caught on to some of the steps pretty quickly, which delighted me. Steve was having a harder time. He felt robotic, kept losing the count, and was getting frustrated.

I recognized that feeling.

That uncomfortable little space where someone beside you seems to be catching on faster, and suddenly you’re less concerned with learning than with whether you’re holding them back.

I’ve been there. Many times.

And in that moment, I had a choice.

I could become the instructor, working harder to find the perfect explanation.

I could become the insecure student, worrying about whether I was doing any of it correctly myself.

Or I could simply be his wife.

So we played.

We tried different ways of moving. He stood behind me to watch my feet. He held my hips to feel the rhythm. We laughed, adjusted, rewound the video, and tried again.

Nobody had to be the expert.

Nobody had to rescue the other.

We just needed to keep finding each other.

After about half an hour, we called it a night.

I was rather proud of myself. Not just because I’d managed to keep my left and right straight more often than not, but because I hadn’t let my own uncertainty steal the experience.

And Steve hadn’t either.

I turned off the television, sent him the tutorial link, and sat down beside him.

He was excited to practice on his own.

I understood completely. I’ve spent plenty of time standing in front of mirrors working through footwork until my body finally catches up with what my brain is trying to tell it.

And there I sat, positively twitterpated.

Like I was in my twenties again, hoping this handsome man I’d known since before he was a man would notice me.

Then we started talking about our previous experiences with dancing.

And that’s when I discovered something.

My husband had never taken a dance class.

Not twenty years ago.

Not once upon a time.

Never.

I was stunned.

I’d assumed he had some experience because I know what that man is like when he finds his rhythm. Frankly, his natural rhythm is better than mine.

But he’d never learned anything like this before.

And suddenly, I understood the X.

The blue painter’s tape. The red electrical tape. The twelve-inch relocation.

All that preparation for something he’d never done.

He was nervous.

Of course he was.

He wanted to learn something new with his wife, something he knew she had experience doing, and he had absolutely no idea whether he’d be any good at it.

But he knew how to make a place for us to begin.

This is the spot.

This is where we’re going to learn.

My wife and I are going to dance together.

Oh, Steve.

My hero.

I keep discovering new versions of this man. Sometimes in enormous gestures, sometimes in the smallest moments, and frequently in ways I never would have anticipated.

But I never expected to discover another dimension of his courage because a blue painter’s tape X had become a red electrical tape X.

And there’s something else about this particular little love story that matters to me.

The last decade hasn’t exactly been overflowing with moments like this.

It’s been filled with circumstances, responsibilities, uncertainties, and interruptions that have a way of stealing these moments before we even realize they’re available to us.

You can love someone enormously and still find yourselves spending most of your energy navigating everything around your marriage instead of enjoying the marriage itself.

And sometimes, after enough of that, you forget how easy it can be to mistake a missed moment for a lack of interest.

Or frustration for unwillingness.

Or hesitation for rejection.

You begin responding to what you think something means instead of asking what it actually means.

Last night, neither of us did that.

I didn’t make the X about adhesives.

Steve didn’t make my delayed arrival about whether I wanted to dance with him.

And neither of us made the other’s uncertainty about our own ability to get it right.

We stepped aside from ourselves just enough to see each other.

And look what we found.

A little room to be awkward.

A little room to be courageous.

A little room to be the people we are now, rather than the people we remember being.

And a whole lot of room to fall in love with each other all over again.

I love that man.

I love that he’s my husband, and I’m his wife, and that after all these years we’re still discovering new ways to make music together.

Our rhythm.

Our ridiculous little dance.

Ours and ours alone.

So I don’t care if there’s an X on the floor.

I don’t care what color it is or what it’s made of.

I don’t care about the shadow that might be left behind.

And I don’t care about my adhesive background.

I care that we danced.