Renee
When Mark and I got married almost 25 years ago, neither of us knew who the other person would become. Which, when you think about it, is a fairly significant unknown when you're promising to spend the rest of your lives together.
We hadn't built businesses together, hosted events, raised twins, navigated some incredibly difficult seasons, or experienced most of the things that would eventually shape who we are today. We were making a lifelong commitment to people who, hopefully, weren't going to stay exactly the same.
I sometimes joke that I'm aging like a fine wine, but in all seriousness, I like who I am at 47 more than I did when I was younger. I'm more confident and self-assured, but I think the biggest difference is that I know who I am.
When I was younger, I carried a lot of beliefs that had been handed to me in childhood. I didn't necessarily stop to ask whether I actually believed them. They were simply part of how I'd been taught to understand myself, other people, and the world. And because Mark was older than I was when we got together, he had more life experience and was pretty confident in his own ideas. It would have been easy for me to replace one set of beliefs I'd inherited with his.
Part of my growth has been learning not to do that. I've learned to separate out what I was taught to believe, what someone else believes, and what I actually believe. Sometimes Mark and I arrive at exactly the same place, and sometimes we don't. The difference is that I don't need him or anyone else to tell me what I think anymore.
I trust myself in a way I didn't when I was younger. Maybe that's one of the gifts of getting older. I'm not necessarily becoming an entirely different person. In many ways, I think I'm becoming more fully myself.
Mark
My growth has looked different. When Renee met me, I had 100 employees and was very focused on achieving, proving myself, and trying to control outcomes. I eventually sold that business and went into sales, in part because I had a vision of publishing a book I'd written called The Human Experience. I spent 11 years as a top sales representative for one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world, and then when Eden and Xen were born, I walked away from that career to pursue something that felt much more connected to my purpose and passion.
At 41, with a lot of help from Renee, I finally self-published The Human Experience. Now, at 56, I can look back and see how much of my younger life was driven by achievement and the desire to prove myself. I wanted to make things happen, and I thought strength meant having the answers, controlling the outcome, and being able to carry everything myself.
I don't feel that same need anymore. I'm much more comfortable with who I am and more trusting of the path we're on. I've learned to listen more deeply to myself, to Renee, and to what life is showing me. I'm more willing to be vulnerable and admit when I don't have all the answers.
One of the biggest areas of growth for me has also been learning that I'm not here to help everyone. I have a lot to offer the right clients, partners, and friends, but my job isn't to please everyone or make myself available to everyone. That's still challenging for me, but I'm getting better at recognizing the difference between serving from a place of genuine connection and serving because I feel obligated to.
Renee
If you've been reading our blog for a while, you know that last part has definitely been a journey for Mark. His instinct to be there for people is one of the things I love about him, but it can also mean that he makes himself very available.
That goes all the way back to his years in sales. Someone would call at night and Mark would answer, which would occasionally lead me to ask, "Are there really such a thing as cable emergencies?"
Apparently, according to Mark, there were.
But I think that's an interesting part of growth that we don't talk about as much. Growth isn't always about identifying something we don't like about ourselves and changing it. Sometimes it's learning how to use one of our greatest strengths in a healthier way. Mark hasn't stopped caring about people or wanting to help them. He's learning that caring about people doesn't require being everything to everyone.
And as we talked about this blog, I realized there is actually a parallel between the way we've both grown. I've had to learn that I don't have to believe what everyone else believes, and Mark has had to learn that he doesn't have to be what everyone else needs. In different ways, we're both getting better at figuring out what's actually ours.
Mark
Over the last several weeks, we've been exploring the Six Human Needs framework from Cloé Madanes and Tony Robbins and looking at how those needs show up in our marriage, family, businesses, and lives. Growth feels like an appropriate place to end this series because, in some ways, it affects all of the other needs we've talked about.
What makes us feel secure changes as we get older. What feels exciting changes. The things that make us feel significant change, as do the ways we connect with people and the ways we want to contribute. All of those things change because we change.
Growth is our desire to learn, develop, expand, and become more than we've been before. But one of the things I've learned from being in a long marriage is that two people don't necessarily grow on the same schedule.
There have been seasons when Renee was changing or questioning things that I wasn't. There have been seasons when I was exploring something that didn't resonate with her in the same way. We've learned different lessons through different experiences, and we haven't always reached the same conclusions at the same time.
I think that's an important distinction, because growing differently isn't necessarily the same thing as growing apart.
Renee
I think we sometimes romanticize the idea of "growing together." It sounds lovely, as though two people hold hands for 50 years and evolve at exactly the same speed, in exactly the same direction, learning exactly the same lessons at exactly the same time.
That certainly hasn't been our experience.
Some growth we choose. We start the business, read the book, have the conversation, take the trip, learn something new, or finally decide that something in our lives isn't working anymore and change it. Then there is the kind of growth that chooses us.
There have been experiences in my life that fundamentally changed me that I certainly wouldn't have volunteered for. I wouldn't choose to experience them again, but I also can't separate who I am today from having lived through them. Life has a way of teaching us things we never signed up to learn.
And when you're married, that means the person beside you is going to change in ways neither of you can predict. The person you married is going to have experiences you can't protect them from, question things they once believed, discover things about themselves they didn't know, change priorities, and hopefully continue evolving for the rest of their life.
Maybe that's the part of "for better or worse" we don't fully understand when we're saying it. You're not promising to love one static version of another person forever. You're agreeing to keep getting to know them as they become someone neither of you has met yet.
Mark
I think that's one of the greatest gifts we can give each other in a long-term relationship: the room to grow without believing that every change is a threat to the relationship.
Renee has influenced who I've become tremendously. She helped me finally bring The Human Experience into the world after I'd carried that vision for years. We've built businesses, raised children, created communities, navigated challenges, and shared experiences that have changed both of us. I know I've influenced who she has become too.
But influencing one another isn't the same as defining one another.
That's something I appreciate even more when I think about what Renee shared about finding her own beliefs. I don't want her to believe something simply because I believe it. I want to know her. And the same is true in reverse. I don't want either of us to stop evolving simply because the version we're already familiar with feels safer.
Growing together isn't about shaping your partner into who you think they should become. It's about staying curious enough to discover who they're becoming and making room for that person in the relationship.
Renee
That idea becomes even more interesting when you're not only married but building businesses together, because our businesses have had to evolve along with us.
What Mark and I wanted when we first became entrepreneurs isn't necessarily what we want now. Our definition of success has changed. Our priorities have changed. The kind of work we want to do has changed, and even our definition of freedom has evolved.
There are things that would have felt like enormous measures of success to us 14 years ago that aren't nearly as important now, and things we value today that probably weren't even on our radar then. That's why I think being Couplepreneurs requires us to keep asking more than, "What are we building?"
Every once in a while, we also have to ask, "Who are we becoming, and does what we're building still fit those people?"
I don't want to stop changing just to make our marriage "comfortable", and I don't want Mark to stop changing either. I want there to be enough room in our relationship for both of us to continue becoming more fully ourselves, even when that means we don't always grow at the same pace or in exactly the same way.
Mark & Renee
We're not the people we married almost 25 years ago, and we're grateful for that. Those two people hadn't met Eden and Xen yet. They hadn't built what we've built, experienced what we've experienced, questioned what we've questioned, or learned most of what we know now. They couldn't possibly have imagined all the versions of ourselves we would become along the way and wow, there were a few.
Hopefully, 10 or 20 years from now, we'll look back at who we are today and realize we've changed all over again.
Maybe that's what growing together actually means. It isn't staying the same so you never risk growing apart, and it isn't expecting two people to evolve in perfect synchronization. It's continuing to know yourself while staying curious about the person beside you, allowing each other to change your minds and outgrow old versions of yourselves without assuming that change means something is wrong.
After 25 years together, we've influenced each other in more ways than we could probably count. But perhaps one of the most loving things we've done is gradually learn that we don't have to define who the other person becomes.
We're not the people we married. We're still getting to know who we're becoming.