It's so nice to dream with you.

Torsten and I had another lovely weekend with no real activities or errands or responsibilities involved. Last night we walked about a mile down the road and had dinner at a little Italian restaurant that we'd been meaning to try. The weather was lovely and the food was good and the conversation was fascinating. Torsten talked about the expectations his parents always placed on him when he was a kid, and the expectations they have for him now. We walked home hand in hand, talking about the expectations we'll have for our own kids, and when we'd like to have our kids.

I just feel blissful about the prospect of the rest of my life. My own happiness almost scares me in how full it is. I am utterly happy now--I have hopes and dreams and plans, and things that I want and don't have, and yet I am so content with the way things are. Our life is so simply happy. We have no debt, we have no worries, we have few responsibilities. We have jobs that we enjoy and an apartment we like and families we love and friends we adore and above all, we have each other.

And I am so excited about a life together, and all the things we will have together, and all the time we will spend together. I am excited to have a house, and a dog, and a child. I am so excited to advance in our careers and our personal lives and grow together and turn to each other and experience everything together.

It makes me so happy to know that no matter what happens in my life, Torsten will be there with me, always on my side, always rooting for me, always supporting me. And that I will be the person he comes to as well, the person who gets to know about his innermost thoughts and feelings, the person that gets access to his tenderness and his caring and his priorities. I feel privileged to get to know him like that, to get to be there for him, to know that he will always be there for me.

When I was younger I wasn't sure I'd like to get married, wasn't sure I believed that you could promise someone that you could love them for the rest of your life, wasn't OK with the idea of making a promise that you weren't sure you could keep. I thought about love in poetically romantic terms, all-consuming love where you couldn't imagine ever being without the other person.

And I do feel that way about Torsten, that romantic and consuming love, but I also feel for him an incredible comraderie, a feeling of being a unit, a team. A consideration of shared needs and goals, not what's best for him or for me but for us as a unit, and what's best for one or the other fitting inside what's best for us as a whole. And that's the part of love that I didn't understand before I experienced it myself, and the part that makes me sure that marriage is right, and that we will only grow to be even more happy and in love as we get older. That shared experience, that shared desire for rightness and growth, those shared goals and aspirations.

That's what I have with Torsten, and because I have it I can tell that it will always be like that, that with work and caring we will grow together and our shared history will only strengthen our marriage, even any painful bits that we may encounter along the way. So my old question is answered: I would like to get married, and I am capable of making and keeping that promise, and I'm so excited to do so.