I wrote Shall We Dance? right after my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, proposed to me. When he became my fiancé, I was so full of love that I wanted to share even a little of it with my readers. I kept thinking about that famous line from Love Actually, the one that says love is all around us. It sounds cheesy, but it has a truth to it, and I felt it so strongly then.
My husband changed me in the best way. Or maybe it is more accurate to say he helped me see the parts of myself that were already good but buried under my own high standards. I have always been hard on myself. I always thought I had to be better, do better, fix more, improve more. I rarely allowed myself to feel satisfied with who I was. But he saw me in a way I had never seen myself. He loved me as I was, without asking me to be different, and because of that, he opened my eyes to the person I already was. A person who didn’t need to climb endlessly upward to feel worthy. A person who was already valuable.
When I realized that, I wanted to give him the same thing in return. I wanted him to see himself the way I saw him. I wanted to embrace his flaws, help him grow in a healthy way, and grow alongside him too. Because becoming better does not have to come from self-criticism. It can come from love. It can come from support. It can come from being on the same team.
So when I said yes to his proposal, it wasn’t just I love you and you love me. It was deeper than that. It was a promise that we would grow together for the rest of our lives, that we were choosing to be one unbreakable team, that we would live, love, and laugh our way through everything. Saying yes felt like eternity opening up for the both of us.
I wrote this book to capture that moment and to manifest that kind of love on the page. I wanted to sprinkle even a little bit of what I felt that night into a story. I hope it reaches as many people as possible, the same way love reaches everywhere around us. It really does. We just need the eyes to see it. And sometimes we need a little help, a small nudge, to recognize it. I hope my book can offer that nudge to someone who needs it.