There was a moment during my friends’ wedding this weekend when I looked around and thought: Who’s in charge here?
It was a perfectly reasonable question.
The wedding was beautiful. The people asked to attend were intentionally chosen which made everything feel rich and wonderful. The love between these two is unshakeable.
AND…they were doing things their way.
Which, as it turns out, is both beautiful and mildly rattling when you’re standing in the middle of it trying to figure out what happens next.
At some point, someone had to step up. That someone was me. (I know…shocking.)
I had been asked to run the agenda. So, there I was with some notes on my iPhone paying attention to timing, figuring out what was supposed to happen next, checking in with all the important humans, and occasionally wondering whether anyone else had received the memo.
Apparently, leadership sometimes looks like standing in a wedding venue thinking, Okay… I guess the most important details are intact. We’re doing the damn thing now.
And yet, as I watched these two throughout the event, something struck me. They weren’t trying to make their wedding look like everyone else’s. They also weren’t trying to perform partnership for an audience.
They were simply creating something that felt like them.
And somewhere between the laughter, the beautiful chaos, the logistics, the dancing, and the moments that didn’t go exactly according to plan, I found myself thinking about harmony.
Not balance. Harmony.
People constantly talk about balance. Work-life balance. Equal partnership. Give and take. That’s not how life actually works. Or love. Or leadership.
Because sometimes one person carries more. Sometimes one person leads more. Sometimes one person has more capacity, more clarity, more energy, or simply knows what needs to happen next. Sometimes one person understands they are a good second in charge.
And sometimes that shifts depending on the season.
When you’re the coordinator for a friends wedding that can shift by the hour or sometimes shift two times within 30 minutes you are required to adjust in real time. And somehow, things flowed without ever feeling chaotic.
Maybe that’s not imbalance. Maybe that’s harmony.
And perhaps this is where the language of the divine feminine and divine masculine becomes interesting to me.
Not as a prescription for how women and men should behave or a set of rules about who leads, who follows, who provides, who receives. And certainly not as another way to squeeze ourselves into a role that doesn’t fit.
I think of the feminine and masculine as energies that exist within all of us.
The masculine carries qualities like direction, structure, action, protection, decisiveness and grounding. The feminine carries qualities like receptivity, intuition, creativity, connection, expansion and flow.
Neither is better and both are important. Neither is meant to operate alone. Because structure without flow can become rigidity. And flow without structure can become chaos. Action without receptivity can become force. Receptivity without action can become passivity.
Direction without intuition can take us somewhere we never actually wanted to go. And intuition without direction can leave us circling the same beautiful idea forever.
Perhaps the point isn’t to balance the two. It’s to bring them into relationship.
That, to me, is where harmony begins.
In social dancing, it’s pretty challenging to flow with someone if you’re both trying to lead. (That took me a couple years to undo). But you also can’t create much of a dance if neither person is willing to lead. (Standing on the sidelines waiting for someone to initiate gets boring).
I learned this long before I had the language for it.
As a dancer, you learn to listen with your body.
You learn that partnership isn’t about controlling every movement. It’s about connection, timing, trust and responsiveness.
Someone initiates. Someone receives.
The roles can change and the energy can shift.
And when two people are really connected, you don’t spend the entire dance wondering who’s in charge. You just dance.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t leadership because there absolutely is. It means leadership and receptivity are working together.
And perhaps that’s what I witnessed in my friends this weekend.
Not two people trying to be equal in every moment. Two people willing to be in relationship with one another.
There is something profoundly feminine about allowing. And something profoundly masculine about directing. There is something feminine about creating space. And something masculine about holding it.
There is something feminine about intuition. And something masculine about deciding. And the beautiful thing is that none of these qualities belong exclusively to women or men. We all carry both.
The question isn’t:
Which one am I supposed to be?
Maybe the better question is:
What does this moment require from me?
Sometimes the answer is to step forward and sometimes it’s to soften. It’s knowing when to hold the line and when to let go. Sometimes it’s leading and sometimes it’s following.
And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, it’s to trust the person beside you enough to let them lead you while also respecting that you can hold your own space.
That requires something we don’t talk about nearly enough when we talk about partnership: trust.
Not blind faith or surrendering your discernment.
But the kind of trust that says:
I know who I am and I know who you are. I don’t need to control every moment for what we are creating to be okay.
Maybe that’s the art of harmony.
It is not about being perfectly balanced and equal in every aspect of life.
But knowing when to move, when to pause, when to lead, when to receive and having enough connection to recognize when the music has changed.
