When Your Children Leave Home…

For many couples, raising healthy and happy children is a main purpose of their marriage. When your children leave home, your contribution as parents takes a different form; your initial purpose as parents begins to change. Your role is less active and your advice and support are usually most welcome when it comes at the request of your adult children. Your primary marital purpose as parents is completing.

Having your children grow up and leave the nest can be disconcerting and stressful for you. Yet, it is also a time in your life that is a wonderful opportunity to create a new purpose for your marriage. This new purpose can be a simple statement of your intentions that are at the heart of the contribution you want to make. This purpose is no longer necessarily just about your own nuclear family.

It often takes time to formulate a purpose for one’s life or for one’s marriage at this stage. It doesn’t happen overnight. Martha and I found ourselves having numerous conversations about the difference we wanted to make at this stage. In our first conversations, we delved into our individual purposes. Each of us had a wealth of experience and wisdom to draw on and we explored our individual contributions.

Martha’s interest was fostering leadership in purpose-driven companies; mine was helping couples in creating enduring and fulfilling partnership in their marriages. What became clear to us was that we each were interested in being leaders in our own purpose-driven company and we were committed to being full partners in our marriage.

Leadership in life and partnership in marriage, for us, have been two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Our purpose has changed and morphed as we have worked together. What is exciting is that we are engaged in conversations about our collective purpose. It has been thrilling to dwell together in the question: What is the difference we want to make at this phase of our lives?

Here are some other questions that you, individually and as a couple, can ask yourselves to discover your unique contribution or purpose. What are you called to do? Where do you want to focus your attention? What is most important to you now? What are your unique gifts as a couple? What can people count on you for? What are you building? What are your intentions? What is the impact you want your marriage to have on others?

For many couples at this time in their lives, purpose for their marriage becomes very simple. Your purpose might be to bring joy into the world. Another purpose might be to love others. Or, your purpose might be to see and acknowledge the greatness in others. By exploring the contribution you want to make as a couple, you can be intentional about the impact that you have in the world.

Posted in Partnership Marriage