"I" People & "We" People: Finding a Middle Path

Are you an "I" person 

or a "We" person?

What do I mean by "I" people and "We" people, you ask.

Let me explain.

My husband and I have been married for 13 years, and we have been together for 25 years.  And in that time, we have come to know on the most intimate level that my husband was born into a "We" family and I was born into an "I" family.

Or, to put it into a political analogy, my husband's family would be communist (the group is more important than the individual) and my family would be libertarian (the individual is more important than the group).

This diverse cultural reality has had all kinds of real world ramifications for our relationship and our families- for example, when under stress I tend to crave solitude but my husband tends to crave togetherness.  So, as you can imagine, with our family origins being at complete opposite ends of the "I" - "We" spectrum in terms of the value placed on the individual versus the value placed on the group, we've had our share of miscommunications and misunderstandings over the 2+ decades of our relationship.

Having said that, our diverse origins have also allowed us to see the positive and negative in prioritizing the individual above all else, and the positive and negative in prioritizing the group above all else because we have each had this bird's eye view of "the other side."

Of course too, what we both find amusing, is this difference between us is all relative.

Because when I am at an event with only my family of origin, it is me who looks like the "We" person, and when my husband is at an event with his only his family of origin, he actually looks like an "I" person.

In other words, context matters when you are looking at a spectrum of ideologies.

Which is why after all these years together, my husband and I have come to believe that the way forward is a Middle Path.

The "Middle Path" is a Buddhist term regarding the Eightfold Path of the Buddha.  But we do not use the term in that way.

What we mean is a reference to, and a reminder to ourselves to avoid the rigidity of extreme ideologies or beliefs in our marriage and in our family life.

Because the truth is: there is a time to prioritize the group and there is a time to prioritize the individual.  Both are valid. Both are true.  That is the dialectic.

And I must add, as my husband and I very imperfectly walk this "I-We" Middle Path together, we make all kinds of what our 9 year-old son would call "epic failures."

Or, in more plain terms, it's messy.

But I have to say, I still like trying.  I like our efforting.

This past weekend, in a particularly messy moment of this walk toward a Middle Path, I had this image of my husband and my marriage as a microcosm for the larger "I-We" tension in our very real-life tug-of-war geo-politics going on nationally in the United States and globally, and I thought to myself: 

It's worth the struggle and the effort to try to figure out how we can harmonize these apparent polar opposite truths into a synthesis that carries even more wisdom than the individual truths do by themselves.

So let's keep walking together.

May it be so.