Erin has asked me to write a little something here about the two of us and our life together.

To be honest, I can’t.

Not because I’m lazy, you understand. No, it’s because beyond a certain point, it’s really hard to explain everything that went in to the two of us getting married. And that’s what’s really the most interesting thing about all this. That’s why you’re reading this, isn’t it? To read the touching, warm, wonderful story about how we met, and fell in love and decided we wanted to be with each other for the rest of our lives. To find out what it was that made us decide to take this leap.

But I’ll be honest with you: I don’t particularly enjoy looking back on everything it took to get to this point. A lot of it was really tough. All worth it, of course. Every minute of it. We dug our feet in quite often, determined that all the hard stuff didn’t matter, ultimately, because we loved each other enough to figure it out, to make it work. To figure out how to spend the rest of our lives together.

As much as the prelude really tells the story, the exciting part of the story of the two of us – from my perspective, anyway – has been knowing that because of all of that work, we’re able to tackle each day as a couple. Doing so makes getting through this life that much more enriching and exciting for me.

I can’t explain that to you alone, because it wouldn’t have happened without both of us working on it together. So me telling that story by myself is impossible. It leaves out Erin’s side of things completely. Without Erin, there is no story, you see. There is no “us.” There is no “rest of my life.”

But Erin has stubbornly refused to work on this with me, so I’ll give it a shot.

Erin and I have been dating for a couple years now. We met while we were working together on a blog called Chicagoist. I was writing about music and movies, and Erin was writing about food.