The first year of marriage has a reputation: the hardest one. Britt Stewart and Daniel Durant just finished theirs and described it with words like “beautiful” and “easy” — which either makes them lucky, or makes their method worth studying. The Dancing with the Stars pro, 37, and the CODA actor, 36, married on Aug. 23, 2025, three years after they met as season-31 partners. Their first year of marriage, by Stewart’s telling, changed surprisingly little — and that is precisely the point.
“It’s been beautiful. Honestly, not much has changed in our relationship, which I hear is a good thing,” Stewart said, reflecting at Dancing with the Stars Con in August. “It’s just been beautiful to be in a relationship with this new intention of marriage and creating a life together.” The pair of newlyweds celebrated their first anniversary that same month, sharing the moment, as Stewart put it at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Creators A-List Party on Oct. 21, with “a lot of the Dancing with the Stars pros and that family” — an anniversary celebration hosted, fittingly, by the DWTS family that introduced them.
(CaseyJNewell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))A Whirlwind Year, Handled Intentionally
Stewart does not pretend the year was quiet. She called it a “whirlwind,” with both partners busy — the reality of two working performers whose busy schedules regularly pull them into different cities. “But again, Daniel makes everything so easy,” she said. The couple’s countermeasure is deliberate: an intentional relationship, maintained on purpose. “We are very intentional with our relationship because we do spend a lot of time apart, but it’s maintaining that connection, and really, it’s through communication,” Stewart explained. “We just communicate as much as we possibly can, and we just share everything. Even if we’re not in the same place, we just share life.”
Staying connected, for them, is not a slogan. This is a couple whose entire bond was built on refusing to let a communication barrier stand: Stewart learned American Sign Language in 2022 so she could teach Durant — born deaf — without relying solely on an interpreter. Sharing life across distance, in ASL and English, by text, video and sign, is simply the grown-up version of that original rehearsal-room decision.
(CaseyJNewell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))Soulmates, by Their Own Description of the Work
It would be easy to file Stewart and Durant under soulmates and stop there — the ballroom meeting, the fifth-place run, the chemistry Stewart first felt in week eight, the Valentine’s Day reveal in 2023, the December 2023 engagement, the vows exchanged in ASL in August 2025. But Stewart’s own framing is less about fate than about maintenance. Asked for the biggest lesson of year one, she did not say “trust” or “patience.” She said communication — “the biggest thing that we’ve learned from the past year and from our relationship as a whole.” “I learned his language,” she added. “We have this beautiful communication between us that holds our relationship together, and we just love on each other.”
(Adam Chitayat / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0))That is the real takeaway from the Stewarts’ first year — and yes, the pun in their shared surname story writes itself. Marriage did not transform their relationship because the relationship was already built like a marriage: deliberate, communicative, conducted in a language both partners worked to share. Year one, in other words, was not a test they survived. It was a rhythm they kept — one conversation, one check-in, one signed “I love you” at a time. If the next years follow the same choreography, nobody in the DWTS family will be surprised. They watched the first rehearsal, after all. They know how this dance goes.
Her anniversary reflections came in two sittings, and they rhyme. At Dancing with the Stars Con in August, marking the milestone itself, Stewart marveled at how fast the year had gone and how little marriage had disrupted the relationship — “which I hear is a good thing.” Two months later, at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Creators A-List Party in Los Angeles on Oct. 21, she supplied the reason: the couple had spent the year doing deliberately what they had done since 2022 by necessity. They communicated — constantly, in two languages, across every mile their careers put between them.
“I can’t believe that it’s been a year,” she said at the party, noting how the anniversary was shared with the DWTS pros — “that family that got to share that special moment with us.” It is a telling guest list for a first anniversary: the colleagues who watched a season-31 partnership become a romance in real time. The ballroom gave them each other; the ballroom family, apparently, remains part of the marriage.
Year two begins with the same tools as year one: intention, honesty about busy schedules, and a shared language in every sense. If Stewart’s account is anything to go by, that is not a compromise arrangement. It is the whole design — and it has now survived a wedding, a whirlwind year and the supposedly dreaded first twelve months, without, as she puts it, much changing at all.
None of this is to say the year was effortless — Stewart’s word “whirlwind” is doing honest work. Two performers’ calendars rarely align, and the couple is candid that they “spend a lot of time apart.” The difference is that they treat the distance as a logistics problem, not a relationship problem, and they solve it with volume: communicate “as much as we possibly can,” share everything, hold nothing in reserve for when they are next in the same city. It is unglamorous advice, repeated by Stewart in interview after interview, and it has the ring of something learned rather than something performed — learned, originally, in a rehearsal room where not communicating was never an option.