It’s critical for people who are getting married to understand that from the moment you seal your vows, your new husband or new wife is now the most important person in your life. They are also your closest relative in the legal and family sense.
In our society, our family is based on the identity of our home of origin. This is an important distinction to understand especially as it relates to step families, adopted families and blood relatives. Because these definitions are all intermingled in the category that makes up our place of origin.
For example, when you think about going home – where do you think of home as being? Is it with your parents? Is it the house where you grew up? Is it with the family that raised you? Is it with your spouse? You see – there are many ways we can define ‘home’ but when we marry – we add another layer of complexity to our definition of home.
This doesn’t mean that by marrying you are severing connections with your families of origin, in fact – you may even deepen those relationships as you begin to understand more about your parents interrelationship with each other. Extended family can also help a newly married couple to stabilize their own marriage as they begin to balance what some may perceive as competing allegiances.
It is these competing allegiances that can cause the most strife in the first part of marriage. There are loyalty issues and personality conflicts that can cause issues between you and your spouse as well as with your spouse’s family. Even in the best of relationships – loyalty and definitions can still cause conflict.
When you marry, you spend the first year or two, adjusting to these changing loyalties and conflicts and learning to renegotiate relationships on all sides. The task of balancing and renegotiating is delicate, but don’t worry too much – it’s a very natural process that we all go through. It’s a lot like learning to walk when we’re infants becoming toddlers – we stumble, we fall down a lot, but we keep trying and eventually – what seemed so hard and so difficult becomes as natural as breathing.
How did you and your spouse handle renegotiating relationships in the early part of your marriage?
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