Bridging the Unbridgeable

A young man who was raised evangelical Christian checks himself into an inpatient rehab center where he encounters the most kind, loving, insightful people he has met; some of whom happen to be gay. This experience forces him to question everything about the way he was raised and eventually leave the church of his entire family. A woman whose career and passion has been as a liberal immigration attorney finds herself with a teenage son who is ardently anti-immigrant and supports Trump’s calls to build a wall across our border and ban immigrants from certain countries. A young adult who is vegan and has deep compassion for animals — who works at a farm animal rescue — has a twin sister who refuses to eat a meal that doesn’t have meat in it.

If we are dating or making new friends, we can pick and choose who we become intimate with. We can decide which values are most important to us and create close relationships with people who share those values. But sometimes we find ourselves in intimate relationships with people we didn’t “choose” who have dramatically different values than we do, forced to make painful and difficult choices about how to navigate those relationships or even whether or not to remain in them at all.

The Oxford Dictionary defines values as “a person’s principles or standards of behavior; one’s judgment of what is important in life.” By this definition, our…