My husband and I are turning forty this year and celebrating our fifteenth year wedding anniversary. As we looked at how we wanted to celebrate these milestones we became aware that this is really a big transition for us as individuals and as a couple.

As part of our celebrating, we have been looking back and reviewing our journey as a couple. Something we are both really proud of is our commitment to clearing addictions from our life. We declared that the addictions that have carried through our family (alcohol, too much TV, overspending…) will stop at our generation.

This declaration was no small matter, and it has had a huge impact on our relationship. By making big decisions like choosing to be alcohol free and to take the TV out of our home our lives took a whole new course. These activities were robbing us of precious time together to genuinely relate to each other. We would come home from work and say we were just going to watch one show on the television. Next thing we knew it would be midnight, we would have barely talked to each other and we would fall into bed “exhausted.” As a result, we didn’t relate to each other or share our victories and failures from the day. Our marriage was not growing. In fact if we had stayed on the track we were on, it is likely our marriage would have ended

Living by our motto, “addictions stop here,” was something we chose after we started experiencing the positive results. It has allowed us to be closer and share more intimate moments than I ever thought possible in a relationship. It has been challenging and we have had our ups and downs with still eating too much sugar or buying.

While we are really proud of where we have gone in our relationship, we realize there is more to go. We took on this huge challenge of cutting out the things in our lives that weren’t serving us or our children – but we realized that we had lots of new, open space to play with. What would we fill it with? This is our new challenge – to find activities and define a quest or vision that is our own as a family. We are starting to see that this quest is defined by relationships, not just in our own family but expanding it outward into the community. When our daughters are teenagers, we want the quality of relationships that we have developed as a family to replicate in the community. Part of our journey is finding “playmates” in an ever-growing circle of support, challenge and love.

Consciously choosing to keep "rocking the boat" in our relationship is very challenging, but has always taken our relationship to a new level.