How To Have A Bit Of Romance When Life Is Not Perfect

I’m so over perfect…how about you?

Life is so beautiful, but so not perfect.  I’m learning how to fully live even in the imperfect.  I’ve learned if I wait for the most ideal situation before fully living, then I will never fully live.

Here is a picture of our quaint but very imperfect back yard.  Now that winter is over and beautiful spring evenings are here, I’ve been wanting to invite my Todd out there on the patio. I have had the perfect bottles of wine just waiting for some beautiful moments out there with my Love.  Life kept getting in the way, with the busyness of 3 teenagers and me not feeling my best, the days just kept passing.

I decided one night that I was tired of waiting for the perfect weekend, where the grass is mowed and I felt good and where we were not busy.  I decided to take action and embrace the imperfect.

So I did.  I put together a fun little ‘cutting board’ snack in the middle of the week –it just took me a bit of thought when I grocery shopped, and then 5 minutes to put together– and invited my Todd out for snack and a glass of wine, and for some perfectly imperfect moments with him.

You know what?  Doing it in the most unexpected of time — even though yard work was not yet done and even though it was not the weekend –this is what made the moments special.  How to have romance when life is not perfect? Just do it anyway.  Just move forward and toward.

I know personally I can wait for the most ideal and then miss out on so much! If all of life was perfect, there would be no character to it, and we would not appreciate the good. Notice the rust on the shed in the above picture.  I think it adds character.  It shows there has been years of weather and yet the shed still stands.  That is a beautiful picture of our marriage.  Boy, have we been through some storms together, and honestly can feel quite rusty at times, yet we have weathered the storms together.  THAT friends, is romantic.

You know what else is romantic?  These little round string lights.  They are one of the things in our little back yard that makes me very happy.  They are a ten dollar string of lights and I think they are quite perfect.

Another thing that I think is quite perfect that we have in our back yard is the sound of water.  It is hard to see in the above picture, but if you look in the lower right corner, you can see our water feature bubbling up between the 3 large rocks.  It adds just the perfect background sound and let me tell you, when the sun goes down and the string lights dance in the breeze and the water fountain is our background music, THAT is romantic.

Don’t miss the imperfection in the picture.  See the dandelions under the ‘grow’ sign?  Yep, I see them too, and I can’t wait to pull them!  As much as I’m trying to embrace the imperfect, I still don’t like pesky dandelions in my rock beds!

Here is our cutting board snack.  It was quite perfect. We had amazing wine from Ribera Y Rueda that went perfectly with our little snack. A little salty with pita crackers, a little savory with bruschetta and hummus, and a little sweet with the tomatoes, grapes and chocolate.  I think the perfect snack has elements of salty, savory and sweet and also lots of crunchy and soft texture.   I think we nailed it with our little cutting board snack and my Todd agreed.

The perfect touch to our imperfect romantic backyard date was most definitely the wine.  Let me tell you a little bit about Ribera Y Rueda wines. For 2,000+ years, winemakers from Ribera and Rueda have cultivated what’s new and what’s next in every vineyard and vintage they produce.  They’re located in northwest Spain and only about an hour away from Madrid.  It has to be awesome!

Back to that perfect wine that tempted me try and make everything else perfect. When I first started planning this little romantic backyard escape in my mind, I wanted little tapas to go with my wine from Spain.  Even though that seems like the perfect pairing, Ribera Y Rueda wines say “Si” to all types of cuisine pairings, which gave me the freedom to pair them with whatever my heart desired.

Todd had Rueda Verdejo, which was of the white grape varietal and was bright and crisp. This bottle is best served chilled.  I fell hard in love with the red Ribera Tempranillo varietal which was bold, rugged & ripe. It is best to open this bottle and allow it to breath for 10-15 minutes. It. Was. Amazing.

To learn more about Rueda regions of origin, wine varietals, wine pairings, a product locator and even a wine-themed playlist, click on through to the Rueda y Rueda Tumblr page feature

I had to snap a few photos of our time together.  I had imperfect hair.  Todd would say he had his imperfect workout shoes on, and even my silly smooch looked a bit manic, but we didn’t care.  We loved every second of it.  It didn’t last long, as the weather didn’t cooperate and it cooled down quickly, but even short and sweet and perfectly imperfect.

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.