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How Do You Define “Us”?

By on August 23, 2013

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The equally beautiful and challenging aspect about a marriage is the fact that you are bringing two different individuals together and creating a unified unit. Of course each individual brings their own family, friends, past experiences, and traumas with them. Within this partnership, all of your baggage and all of your significant other’s baggage are blended together. This in turn delivers new surprises, both pleasant and shocking, nearly every day.

You spend a large part of your young adult life figuring out who you are as a person.  (Some of us are still trying to figure that out.) You are constantly trying to figure out how you fit into this big world and what role you want to play. Remember being in grade school and having to answer questions like “what makes YOU special?” and the age-old, “what do you want to BE when you grow up”. We were forced to write those acrostic poems –as in, K A T I E, K – kind, A – awesome, T – Talented, I – Interesting, E – Energetic. We were always taught to establish ourselves as our own unique brand.

Now that you are a couple, you are bringing two unique brands together and merging into an incorporated company. Along with both of our pasts, Ryan and I are also merging all of our dreams for the future. To ensure we are building a strong foundation to live our most fulfilled and purpose driven life, I want to be sure to take the time to talk about what our life as a team looks like. We now must once again ask ourselves those familiar questions in respect to the couple we are now part of:

How do you define “us”? What do “we” look like?

The beautiful thing about being in a life long partnership like marriage is that you have a clean slate. With the help of our shared experiences we now can create a new definition of what we want our combined future to look like. Life is certainly full of ups and downs and I still expect to go through many more changes independently and as a couple. I understand that the true definition of who we are as a couple will evolve over time. However, a lot of who you become is up to you and your partner.

This is our chance to invent something that is truly unique to us.  The important questions for me are: What do we want to accomplish before starting a family? What type of parents do we want to be? What type of family will we be? What type of couple do we want to be in our sixties?  If you don’t make the time to define your identity as a couple, life will simply make choices for you by getting in the way. This is our opportunity to start a new chapter. Don’t forget that you are in charge of choosing your own beautiful little adventure.  Who do you want to be?

 

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