How To Increase Your Individuality In Your Marriage

Allowing others to be apart of your identity increases your individuality. 
  
 There is in existential thought the belief that we are not just solitary isolated object but, rahter, we exist in relationships with the environment, the culture and others. Heidigger especially emphasizes that humans, "being in the world", are embedded and cannot be extracted from meaning ful social interactions. 
This philosophical concept shows that self identity must inclue other people. At the univeristy, most students come seeking to find and wanting to establish their individuality. In marriages, many partners fear they will lose their identity. They are on guard and want to protect their existing individuality. This usually entails making a clear separation of self from other, but, with age, we find that this approach is not healthy. The false nature of this beginning is told in the following story:

Many a young girl like Laura was told during her last years of the 20th Century not to depend on someone else, not to sacrifice self for another, to be totally independent, and self- sufficient. This well meaning advice sounds nice, but htere really has never been anyone who has done it, especially in a marriage that was happy, and long lasting. 

Laura was more than just uneasy when heard the words of the marraige ceremony saying, "...to be one, to cleave unto another..." and then cam a binding ring, a taking on the name of another, the word belonging, and being Mrs (Someone) else rather than two seperate persons. She was even asked to put his needs ahead of hers. 

At age 22, this way of being was a serious problem for Laura, but at age 62 it became laughable. Over the years she learned through family life and love that she had lost nothing by being with the imperfect man she loved, but, instead grew to be a more complete person.

A boat without water is not the same thing as a boat in water. A mother with a bear cub is a different animal than the same mother bear without the cub. The expression "no man is an island" is true when talking about personal identity. 
So, If you want to understand yourself, you must also consider how you define yourself with significant others and most importantly, how you define yourself with the one you love. 
A mother is an almost perfect example of this sharing an identity. Even before her birth, her baby has become part of her. Her life and identity will from then on never exist from her child. A mother and child share, in the course of living, their idenity with one another. The mother does not exist seperately from the child. 
This can be true of husband and wife. A consequence or outcome to the first person is a consequence and outcome to the other. Indeed, people who I have a shared idenity readily state that when an honor is bestowed on the other, it is as if they had recieved it themselves, or if the other suffered, they too suffered. 
      The concept of shared identity may have a very practical meaning for you. Do you find that your idenity is closely bound up to the idenity of one or more other persons?
If so, then to understand yourself you must consider that they are actually part of your identity. Your answer to the above question will open the door for yet another intrusion upon your individuality. I will discuss this at a later time.