family.

"You'll see when you move out. It just sort of happens one day... and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't even exist... maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself... for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." 

-Andrew Largeman, "Garden State"

Family is an incredibly complicated thing, even in the most basic sense: the definition. Who is family, and what exactly makes them family? Blood, marriage, friendship, love - sometimes one, sometimes all of these things. To some, family is a basic nuclear unit, visiting extended relatives during special occasions. Some have more diverse family structures due to divorce, remarriage, differences in biological origins, etc. And some people aren't even technically related - but they're family just the same. We recently had a discussion with someone whose extended family includes descendants of her grandmother's best childhood friend. No blood relation, but they celebrate the main holidays together and call each other "cousins." Family can be a lot of wonderful things.

Very soon after our engagement, Ben and I realized that many people in our families had different and sometimes conflicting ideas of what "family" meant. Planning a wedding seemed to open up a large can of worms, resulting in many hard conversations about topics that had never been fully discussed before. And although the situations were - and still can be - rather frustrating to deal with, it was also fascinating to observe and examine the ways in which different people define, and act as, family. Personal experiences and expectations play a big part in these differences. And because our families come from a variety of cultures, races, religions and backgrounds, things will always be complicated. And that's okay. Our families are beautiful.

But in all reality, a wedding isn't just the joining of two (or more) families - it's the celebrated separation of two people that have chosen to create their own family. For Ben and I, our families are still family, but now things are different. We still belong to our respective families. We are also a part of each others' families. 

And now we're a completely new family altogether. 

CK