Making Room for Your Core Values in Marriage
When I was 21, going on 22, I moved to China to teach English.
When I think about it now, it seems a little crazy. At that point in my life, I had never even left the country. I had never been on a long-haul flight. And yet, I packed my bags for a year and boarded a plane.
That year kicked off a lifelong love affair with travel and, even more importantly, revealed one of my core values to me: adventure.
After my year in China, I scooted across the world to live in Africa and then Southall, London, trying to figure out my calling and purpose. Eventually, I settled back in Nashville, Tennessee, to plot my next move (and pay off my college loans)!
I was just months away from moving to Morocco when I met my husband.
I decided to stick around and see how things would play out. In the meantime, I started graduate school.
Lucky for me, he was a touring musician at the time, so I still got to see quite a bit of the world.
Eventually, we settled in, got married, quickly became parents, and I finished graduate school. We were scrappy with our finances and still tried to find ways to explore the world and different parts of the United States.
Then he started graduate school, money got tight, and our adventures began to look a little different.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was still finding ways to live out one of my core values.
Adventure didn't always look like hopping on a plane or exploring a new country.
Sometimes it looked like moving to a new city. Sometimes it meant rehabbing an old 1800s house.Sometimes it was finding a new restaurant, trying a new wine, discovering a new trail, or taking the kids somewhere we'd never been.
And, honestly, I think the number of children we have says something about my values too. Surely five kids is an adventure, right?
Values Change Shape in Different Seasons
One of the things I talk about with couples is the importance of understanding your core values—the things that give your life meaning and make you feel most like yourself.
And here's the thing about values:
The way we live them can change dramatically from one season of life to another.
When you have small children, for example, your life can become incredibly demanding. There are diapers, school schedules, sports, meals, bedtime routines, sick kids, laundry, work, and approximately 8,000 snacks to procure each week.
There may not be a lot of room for spontaneous adventure.
You may not be able to travel the way you once did. You may not have the time, money, energy, or freedom you once had.
That doesn't mean adventure stopped being one of your values.
It may simply mean adventure has taken a different form for this season.
Maybe adventure is taking your toddlers camping for the first time.
Maybe it's a Saturday morning hike.
Maybe it's exploring a new neighborhood or restaurant.
Or maybe, during a particularly exhausting season, adventure simply becomes something you hold onto in your imagination while you survive another bedtime.
The same is true of so many of our values.
If community is important to you, it may look different when you have newborns than it does when your children are teenagers.
If health is a core value, your version of taking care of yourself may look different when you're raising young children than it does when you have an empty nest.
If creativity is important to you, there may be seasons when you are painting and creating—and other seasons when creativity means finding a way to make dinner out of whatever is left in the refrigerator.
The expression of the value changes.
The value itself remains.
Making Room for Your Spouse's Values
My husband has always made space for the adventurous part of who I am—usually to his dismay.
He doesn't like camping. He doesn't even particularly like hiking.
And yet, he has consistently gone along with building adventure into our family life.
In our family, we affectionately call it "Forced Family Fun" when Mom comes up with a new idea or a new mountain to climb.
But here's what I see in that:
He doesn't have to love adventure in exactly the same way I do in order to recognize that it is important to me.
And I don't have to share every one of his values in exactly the same way to recognize that they are important to him.
This is one of the beautiful—and sometimes difficult—parts of marriage.
Marriage is a closed system. Two people are continually influencing one another, and over time it can become easy to assume that your way of living is the "right" way.
But a flourishing marriage requires something different. It requires us to see our spouse clearly.
To notice what makes them come alive. To understand what gives their life meaning.
And then, when possible, to make room for those things—even when they aren't necessarily our things.
Because when we continually ask our spouse to shrink, suppress, or abandon the parts of themselves that matter most, something happens:
They begin to shrivel up.
And eventually, the marriage can too.
Making room for your spouse's values doesn't mean saying yes to everything they want to do. It doesn't mean abandoning your own needs or living at the mercy of your partner's preferences.
It means being curious.
"Why is this important to you?"
"What does this represent for you?"
"How can we find a way to make some room for this in our life together?"
Those questions can change a marriage.
What Are Your Core Values?
I encourage most of my couples to spend some time thinking about their core values—not just individually, but as a couple.
What makes you feel most alive?
What gives your life meaning?
What do you want your family to be about?
And then ask an equally important question:
What would it look like to make room for my spouse's values too?
Here are a few values to get you thinking:
Community
Faith
Family
Adventure
Creativity
Health
Learning
Connection
Beauty
Service
Freedom
Security
Growth
Generosity
Fun
Spirituality
You don't have to share all the same values as your spouse.
In fact, you probably won't.
The goal isn't to become the same person.
The goal is to build a life where both people have room to be fully themselves.
And My Adventure Continues…
Next month, I get back on a long-haul flight to China.
I'm going back to the place where my 21-year-old self first discovered just how much adventure mattered to me.
It is a significant sacrifice for our family—in time, money, and logistics. But we've decided that it's worth making room for.
Because this is still part of who I am.
And my 21-year-old self cannot wait.
Maybe that's what happens when we pay attention to our values.
They keep calling us back to ourselves.
Even as our lives change. Even as our marriages change. Even as our children grow.
The adventure may look different.
But the value remains.