Family can mean many things. It can refer to your immediate family, extended family, the family you create by living with someone, or the growing family you may hope to have one day.

If you have relationships in your life, then it is almost guaranteed that you will also face conflicts from time to time. Ignoring difficulties or handling them in harmful ways, can affect your mental rest and even rob you of sleep at night.

Ten years ago, I received some good relationship advice that I still apply to my friendships and marriage today. I call it “The 5.” Five topics to discuss with someone you are in a relationship with that will help you both remain honest and keep things healthy between you.

We all know the scene. A certain person in a crowd catches another certain person’s eye. They glance at each other nervously, move around on the fringes, and finally come together to talk.

But the truth is, my parents didn’t have some strategic plan for getting the family together each evening for a meal. We were all home anyway and didn’t have the money to eat out. There was no ulterior motive or hidden benefit they knew about.

Yet despite the incredible connectivity across the world, people feel more lonely and more isolated than ever. Rather than meet our neighbors across the street, we sit alone and meet neighbors around the globe. It’s easier to scroll through social media

So why am I talking about this? And what is a rift? A rift is a crack, break, etc. in something. I call this time in our relationship a rift because that’s exactly what it was. Something fell from the sky, made a crack, and wedged itself in.

Over time, those relationships became strained and eventually toxic. I never learned to have grace and never allowed others to redeem the relationship. As I grew older, I had a hard time working with others and forming friendships. Because I never truly understood how to properly resolve conflict. 

There’s a strange and rarely spoken of dynamic in our culture that often questions the validity of mixed gender relationships. As one journalist put it, it’s as if, “they cast us as romantic time bombs, rather than people who simply care about each other and enjoy spending time together” (Gerson, 2020).

I wish this weren’t the case, but until you’re an adult, there are things you may not have a say in that will always drain you. That was the case for me as a teenager with my parents visitation schedule after their divorce. Packing and switching homes every week was exhausting in a way that went bone deep.

There is a little secret to it. And it’s all how you see the other person. What if you saw the other person as someone who needed just as much grace and love as you do? Because, like I said, if you’re breathing, then you have been wronged—meaning you have wronged another person.

So I got back at them. I made new friends. I found a new tribe, a new community. But these were not good people. Okay, so I really wasn't consciously trying to get back at my parents, but I did get myself mixed up in the wrong crowd. It was almost an overnight transformation. I became someone entirely different. 

What do I mean? Let me show you. Let’s say that one of your siblings has taken something of yours without asking. You’ve already talked with them in the past and told them they have to come to you first if they want to borrow something, but here they are wearing one of your favorite shirts again.

You know what, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the way you feel about nachos is not exactly the same way that you feel about your Mother. And you probably don’t feel the same way toward your favorite shoes as you do your boyfriend or girlfriend. So why on earth do we use one word to describe all these different feelings!? Good question. Welcome to one of the most frustrating things about the English language.

The relationship we have with our parents has a significant outcome on who we are someday, how we behave, and who we gravitate towards. I want to normalize this for a moment, though, and say that we ALL have daddy issues.

In some ways, the divorce of a stepfamily is more complicated than the divorce of a biological family. There are legal requirements and visitation schedules that keep biological family members linked even after a divorce. That is not the case when it comes to stepfamily members. 

If you feel that you already have a close friend or two, that you have your community of people to support you, then try to be that for someone new. Not everyone is brave enough to take that first step. On the other side of that, we can’t wait for someone to make the first move either. The years and years that the people at this conference, and myself, felt so alone were because we kept waiting for someone else to extend the invitation. 

I didn’t know I had a conflict style until after I got married. I came from a family where there was lots of yelling and tense undertones whenever there was an issue that needed to be tackled. It made me extremely uncomfortable as a child in this environment, as I was also highly sensitive and not well practiced in different techniques of how to handle overwhelming emotion

So here’s a question: how do you know that you can trust someone enough to be vulnerable with them? The way relationships work is this: in order to be vulnerable, we do need to experience some level of trust with that person, but in order to create trust, we often need to share some level of vulnerability.

Two months ago I wrote a letter. I wrote it exactly as I would have from my deathbed... except that I wasn't on my deathbed and that was the entire point. Movies really love to dramatize those end-of-life-bucket-list-final-hurrah moments but the truth is that if I really was on my deathbed I'd probably be so exhausted and busy with the work of ACTUALLY dying that writing such a letter would be ten times harder, if not impossible. So, better to do it now.