Happy New Year! I hope you are as excited as I am to welcome 2018 into our lives. Before I get into posts about goals for this upcoming year, I felt the urge to write about less waste and relationships. Nothing I have to say about this subject is groundbreaking but I wanted to encourage you if you find that some of these practices are not completely embraced by everyone in your life, be it family members, spouses, roommates, and significant others.

For those of you who have known me and Andrew, you know that we are both strong willed/headed and stubborn. Though we’ve known each other since we were 19 and 20, we didn’t start dating until 4 years later and goodness, were those dating years full of massive blowups. I’m pretty sure when people found out we had gotten engaged, there were bets taken on how many weeks the marriage would last. But praise God, as soon as we said, “I do,” a switch was flipped and most things smoothed out. Fast forward to almost 8 years of marriage and as we continue to love each other and continue in our marriage, we are still the same strong willed/headed, stubborn individuals we were at 23 and 24 but we’ve learned how important compromise and grace are. Since I have a whole Facebook page about living with less waste, it might seem that anything I want to do in respect to this, we do. This is not true and it never is more evident than around Christmas time. My dream is that my kids would get 2-3 gifts from us and maybe a few gifts from other folks and that would be it. However, Andrew sees it differently. In his view of Christmas, there are many more gifts bestowed on our children. And it’s not just Christmas, there are birthdays to be celebrated, random gifts while out running errands with the girls, etc. After many “discussions” about my abhorrence of all this crap, I have learned that I won’t be getting my way completely on this subject, ever. Andrew is going to do this whether I get up in arms about it or not. I’ve learned to be ok with this by asking him to find a place for everything and to pare down the toy box every few months and he has agreed with this along with (slightly) cutting down on the number of gifts given to the girls. It’s a good compromise for us. I’m using this as an example because it just popped up again this past week but it applies to a lot of other aspects to less waste living if you don’t have others in your life 100% on board. Almost everyone in my life that is important to me, knows about my less waste desires. Whether they choose to always go along with them is up to the individual. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. I’ve learned that I have to stop getting so upset every time something isn’t done the way I want it to be done. It’s not worth the energy spent on being angry or feelings being hurt.

Have you found yourself in this predicament as you try to live less waste? A roommate balks at not using blue sponges or doesn’t want to compost? Family continually throws parties using plastic utensils and styrofoam plates? Be gracious towards others AND yourself. When it comes to this lifestyle, be prepared to compromise in order to maintain relationships and your sanity. Accept that it won’t always be done your way and figure out ways that you can both win.