We Weren't Actually Merged

Our marriage was fine until we had kids.

I know that's not what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to say the early years were hard. The sleepless nights. The loss of identity. The strain on the relationship.

But that wasn't our story.

Our marriage was easy in those early years. Before kids. Before real decisions. Before the thing that would eventually crack us open and force us to actually build something together.

And I think I finally understand why.

We weren't actually merged.

We met in our late twenties. Both of us had lived full lives before finding each other. Ole is Norwegian. Logical. Steady. The kind of man who shows love through problem solving and dependability. His family expressed care through practicality. Emotions were private. Conflict was something to be avoided, smoothed over, minimized.

I'm from Brooklyn. My family was loud. Opinions weren't just welcomed, they were currency. If someone had a feeling, everyone in the house knew about it. We argued because we cared. Silence meant something was wrong.

Two completely different operating systems.

But here's the thing. For the first several years of our marriage, it didn't matter.

Ole got up most mornings and went to work. I went my way. We met for a few hours when he came home for dinner. We talked about our days. We laughed. We were happy.

And then we went back to our separate corners.

We were two people who loved each other. Two people who shared a home, a bed, a life. But we weren't really building anything together. We were parallel lines running in the same direction. Close enough to call it partnership. But not actually merged.

I didn't see it then. I thought we had a great marriage. And in a way, we did.

We just hadn't been tested yet.

There's a stat I came across a few years ago that I've never forgotten. Researchers found that 67% of couples experience a significant decline in relationship satisfaction after having their first child. Two thirds. And it doesn't bounce back quickly. For many couples, it takes years to recover. Some never do.

I used to think this was because kids are hard. The sleepless nights. The stress. The division of labor. The logistics of keeping tiny humans alive.

But I don't think that's the real reason anymore.

I think kids expose what was already true.

Before children, you can coast. You can be two individuals who happen to share a life. You can avoid the hard conversations because there's nothing forcing you to have them. You can disagree on values, on vision, on what you're actually building together, and never know it. Because there's nothing in the middle making those differences visible.

Kids change that.

Suddenly there's a human being who needs you to agree. Who needs you to have shared values. Who needs you to make decisions together about things that actually matter.

And that's when you realize: we never agreed on any of this.

For the first three years of my daughter's life, Ole and I operated on assumptions.

We assumed we were on the same page about how to raise her. We assumed we shared a vision for her future. We assumed that when the time came to make real decisions, we'd naturally align.

We never actually talked about it.

Why would we? There was a script. Everyone around us was following it. Good neighborhood equals good school district equals good college equals good life. This budget equals this house. This age equals this milestone.

Plug and play. No real decisions required.

We weren't thinking. We were solving equations.

And equations feel safe. They feel like partnership. You're both looking at the same formula, getting the same answer. It feels like agreement.

But it's not. It's just math. And math doesn't require you to know each other. Math doesn't require you to merge.

I didn't see this until I started questioning the equation.

My daughter was three years old when I first said the word.

Homeschool.

We were living in the suburbs by then. We'd bought the house less than a year before. The one in the good neighborhood with the good school district. The one that was supposed to set her up for success. The one that followed the equation perfectly.

And I was undoing all of it with one word.

I don't think I understood at the time what I was really saying. I thought I was talking about education. About schedules. About spending more time with my daughter.

But that's not what Ole heard.

He heard: I want to leave the equation.

He heard: I don't trust the experts anymore.

He heard: I want us to decide. Not the school district. Not the government. Not the people who are supposed to know better than us. Us.

And that terrified him.

Because if we weren't following the equation, then who were we? What did we believe? How would we know if we were doing it right?

I was asking us to become the authors of our own story. And we'd never had to do that before.

I remember the SAT fight like it was yesterday.

Our daughter was three. THREE. And we were screaming at each other about standardized testing.

It sounds absurd now. But it didn't feel absurd then.

Ole's argument was logical. If we homeschool, how will she be prepared for the SAT? And if she can't do well on the SAT, how will she get into a good college? And if she doesn't go to a good college, how will she have a good life?

The equation. Always the equation.

And then I said something that made it worse.

I don't think she needs to go to college at all.

The silence after that sentence was deafening.

Here was the thing. It was 2012. The world was changing fast. I could feel it even then. The old paths weren't guaranteeing what they used to guarantee. A degree wasn't the golden ticket it had been when we were growing up. Something was shifting. I didn't know what AI would become or how quickly everything would accelerate. But I sensed it. Something in me knew that the equation everyone was following was built for a world that might not exist by the time our daughter grew up.

But I couldn't prove it. I couldn't show him the data. I just felt it.

And he couldn't feel it. He needed the logic. He needed the proof. He needed the equation to hold because the equation was how he understood safety.

We weren't fighting about SATs.

We were fighting about who we were going to become.

Here's what nobody tells you about marriage.

Sometimes your circumstances don't change, but you do.

And that internal shift, the one that happens underground where no one can see it, that shift can shake your entire relationship.

I was becoming someone new. The mother I thought I'd be, the one who would hand her kids off to the experts when they turned five, she was dying. And a different version of me was being born. A version who asked questions. Who challenged assumptions. Who wanted to build something intentional instead of following a script.

But the life we'd built was designed for the old me.

The house we'd bought. The neighborhood we'd chosen. The plans we'd made. All of it was built on equations I no longer believed in.

And Ole was still living in that world. The world where the equations worked. Where following the path meant everything would be fine. Where trusting the experts was the responsible thing to do.

I wasn't just asking him to homeschool our daughter.

I was asking him to let me become someone different. I was asking if our marriage could hold a version of me that hadn't existed when we said our vows.

That's the real question underneath every fight like this.

Can this relationship survive who I'm becoming?

It took three years.

Three years of conflict. Three years of tension. Three years of me seeing something he couldn't see yet, and him holding onto a safety that I could no longer believe in.

I've written about this before. The moment it finally shifted.

It was two weeks into first grade. Two weeks of the pavlovian responses. The way the kids moved on command. The way the light in their eyes was already dimming.

I came home that day and told Ole I couldn't do this anymore.

But I didn't ask him to agree with me. I asked him to go to open school night without me. Just him. And I asked him one thing: Take off the logical hat. Just this once. Go with your heart.

He went.

I don't know exactly what the teacher said. Maybe it was something about getting the kids under control. Maybe it was how she said it. But something landed.

He came home different.

He told me later what happened in that moment. Sitting in that classroom, listening to the teacher, he saw himself. Not as a father evaluating a school. As a boy. He remembered who he was before school started. The energy. The curiosity. The life in him. And he remembered when it left. How school had slowly trained the aliveness out of him. How he'd learned to be "logical" because that's what was rewarded. How he'd forgotten there was ever another version of him.

In that classroom, watching the teacher explain how she'd manage his daughter, he felt what I'd been feeling for three years.

The system wasn't designed to nurture her. It was designed to do to her what it had done to him.

And that's when the real merger began.

I used to think the merger happened at the wedding. That when you say your vows, you become one unit. A partnership. A team.

But that's not true.

The wedding is just the announcement. The merger happens later. Sometimes much later. And sometimes it never happens at all.

Some couples go their whole lives as parallel lines. Close enough to call it marriage. Sharing a home, a bed, a life. But never actually building something together. Never forced to answer the hard questions because they've outsourced those answers to the culture, the experts, the equations.

Kids don't automatically create a merger. They create the need for one.

Suddenly you can't avoid the questions anymore. What do we value? Who are we raising? What do we believe? Who decides?

And in that moment, you have a choice.

You can keep following the equations. Find a school, pick a neighborhood, let the experts handle the hard parts. Stay parallel. Stay safe.

Or you can actually merge. Sit down and say: What do WE believe? Not what we inherited. Not what everyone else is doing. What do WE think is true? What are WE building here?

That conversation is terrifying. Because it exposes every place where you don't agree. Every assumption you never examined. Every difference you papered over by following the script.

But it's also the beginning of building something real.

Here's what I learned from those three years of fighting about homeschooling and SATs and what kind of life our daughter would have.

Most couples aren't making decisions together. They're following equations together. And that feels like partnership until one person starts questioning the math.

The conflict in a marriage isn't usually about the thing you're fighting about. It's about who you're each becoming. It's about whether the relationship can hold two people who are changing at different speeds in different directions.

And the deepest question underneath every conflict is this: Can we build something that's actually ours? Or are we only capable of following someone else's blueprint?

If you're in a season where something feels off but you can't name it, pay attention.

Sometimes that tension isn't a problem to solve. It's a becoming that's trying to happen. Something in you is shifting. Some old equation no longer adds up. Some script you've been following doesn't fit anymore.

That discomfort is growth trying to happen.

The question is whether your family, your partnership, your life can hold the person you're becoming.

So here's what I'd invite you to consider.

Not as a checklist. Not as another equation to solve. But as a genuine excavation.

Are you actually merged? Or are you parallel lines running in the same direction?

The test is simple. When was the last time you and your partner disagreed about something fundamental? About values. About vision. About who your kids are becoming and what role you play in that.

If you can't remember, it might mean you're beautifully aligned.

Or it might mean you're both just following the same equations without examining them.

What would it look like to stop solving equations and start making actual decisions?

Equations are things like: This neighborhood equals this school equals this outcome.

Decisions are things like: What do we actually believe about education? About success? About what our kids need from us?

Equations feel safe because someone else built them. Decisions feel risky because they're yours.

But only decisions build something that's actually yours.

What tension are you carrying that you haven't named yet?

Maybe it's about school. Maybe it's about work. Maybe it's about where you live or how you spend your time or what you're modeling for your kids.

If something has been nagging at you, something that doesn't fit but you haven't let yourself fully feel it, that's worth paying attention to.

Growth announces itself as tension before it shows up as clarity.

Are you willing to let your partner become someone new?

This one cuts deep.

Marriage doesn't just ask you to love who someone is today. It asks you to make room for who they're becoming. Even when that becoming disrupts your plans. Even when it challenges your assumptions. Even when it scares you.

The couples who make it are the ones who can say: I don't fully understand where you're going, but I'm willing to go with you. Let's figure this out together.

Ole and I have been married for nineteen years now. We've homeschooled for sixteen of them. We've lived in six countries and traveled to over thirty as a family.

Our daughter Kaja, the one we were fighting about when she was three, published her first book at thirteen. Released an album at fourteen. Got scuba certified at ten. She's sixteen now and has more clarity about who she is and what she wants to build than most adults I know.

Our younger daughter Kamilla is writing a book series about the hidden history of food. Tomatoes that came from Mexico. Stories that got erased. Winners write history, she says. I'm rewriting it.

She's fourteen.

I don't say this to brag. I say it because none of this would have happened if Ole and I had kept following the equations. If we'd stayed parallel lines instead of actually merging. If we'd handed our kids to the experts and hoped for the best.

The merger wasn't easy. The SAT fight almost broke us. The three years of tension and conflict and not understanding each other almost ended our marriage.

But that tension was the beginning of something real.

We stopped solving equations. We started building.

And what we've built is ours.

If this is resonating, if you're feeling that pull to examine what you've been building without realizing it, I made something for you.

It's called The Family Launch Plan.

It's not a checklist or a formula. It's a guided excavation. Six pages of the questions that actually matter. About your values, not the ones you inherited, the ones you've proven. About your vision, not "happy kids" but who actually walks out of your house. About your culture, designed or defaulted. About your rhythms, the connection points that hold you together.

It's free. And it might be the beginning of your merger.

→ [Get The Family Launch Plan]

Next week, I want to talk about values. Not the words on paper kind. The kind you discover when you ask: What has this family actually sacrificed for?

That's where it gets real.

Until then.

Azizi

P.S. If you're in the middle of your own SAT fight right now, the conflict that feels like it's about logistics but is really about identity, I see you. The tension is uncomfortable. But it might be the most important conversation your family ever has. Stay in it.