51. A Story about Different Values and How That Can Look in the World

March 6, 2026

Today I’m going to tell you a story. I thought this was only my story, one chapter of my adult life, but now I see it as something bigger. When John would tell this story in the years following, I would feel embarrassed, so I asked him to stop telling it. Then last week, I met another woman, another couple, who had the SAME story, and it made me realize it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And I also realized that it is a great illustration of different values, and how values impact decisions and become real in the world It also demonstrates how people see things differently when they hold different values. We naturally see things through our own values, until someone has opened our eyes to see things differently. Being able to understand that disagreements are driven by different values can change the way we engage with each other. However, we need to learn how to see the values behind the preferences. This story also speaks to the way our life experiences impact our values and illustrates how values can change over time.

Here’s the story: After we had been married two years, we lived in DC and John worked for a consulting firm that worked with states to support their Medicaid programs. I was finishing graduate school in Pittsburgh, traveling back and forth as I finished the research, analysis and writing for my dissertation. I was 32 and had been in school for a long time. I was excited but also nervous about what type of work I would find once I finished. We had bought a condo and lived in Dupont Circle. We had a lot of friends from graduate school in DC who we saw often. Our families were not near, but we saw them 3-4 times a year. I was pretty involved in the youth group at our church. John traveled almost weekly for work.

John came home one day to tell me that there was an opportunity for us to spend six months working in Hawaii. He had been traveling there for a project for a while, and they wanted someone onsite. We’d have housing so financially, it would not have been burden. We talked about how we probably would not see our families during that time (our parents were still working and it was a long trip). I don’t remember all the details of our discussion, but in the end, I said no, I don’t want to move to Hawaii. And we didn’t. As we remember it now, my biggest sticking point was that I was about to finish school and start looking for a job in DC. I was excited to start working, to start applying the skills and experience that I had earned over my 6 years of graduate school to real world problems, and to start contributing. I could not imagine sitting on the beach for six months after working so many years to build up knowledge and expertise to work on things I cared about.

Another factor in my perspective that I can see now, as I look back, is that my family moved around a lot when I was a kid for my dad’s job. My mom was a nurse when they got married, but stopped working after I was born. This is also about the time that the moving started, as my older brother and I were born in Texas, but my younger sister was born in Colorado. My parents made the choices they made to thrive in the world they were born into. But I know the moving was difficult for my mom, and she worked hard to make sure it was not hard on us. The work that needed to go into simply navigating a new place and then working to build a community on top of that was daunting to me. I can also see now that maybe I knew at the time that six months was just about when you started feeling connected to a place, so we’d be leaving just as we started to feel settled. In contrast, John grew up in the house he moved into when he was 7. He moved as an adult, once to Phoenix and then once to DC when we got married. Both of those places had some people he already knew, so he had never started from scratch. I see now that my experience had likely led me to be more hesitant about starting anew than he was.

So that was my embarrassing story – who would turn down six months in Hawaii? What was wrong with me? How was I so focused on my career that I could not take six months and relax before starting my job search? This was the way that story resonated in my head for a long time. However, last week, we had dinner with another Medicaid person and his wife, and they had the same story! He was offered an opportunity to move to Hawaii early in their marriage, and his wife did not want to go. After 25 years of thinking how could I possibly have turned that down, it was so validating to hear that was another woman’s instinct as well. What was the part that led us to that decision? Was it the need to leave our communities? Was it the unknown opportunity for work? Was it the distance from our families? Probably all of the above. These are the values that for us were strongest. John did not worry much about these things – he was focused on the work he’d do and the chance to live in an amazing place; those were his strongest values at the time. That and, ultimately, the value of me being happy and being able to pursue my career in the way that I wanted to.

Years later, we did move to Ohio for a work opportunity for John, but at that time, there were several other reasons. We needed new educational option for the kids, and our 1938 house needed more maintenance and upkeep than our government salaries could afford. We also were looking forward to being within driving distance of John’s family after so many years of flying back and forth for visits. And the Midwest was familiar to both of us, so we made that move. And, importantly, this was a big opportunity for John to level up in his work experience, not a temporary assignment.

Now, I look back at that decision and am amazed at the strength of my values then. If I had the chance to move to Hawaii for six months now, there would be little hesitation on my part. I do expect that our lives would have unfolded differently if we had moved. I started working soon after that and had a career and work experiences that I am very proud of. The person who ended up going for that project ended up staying for more than a year in that position and then stayed in Hawaii after that. What types of opportunities would I have had for that in Hawaii? I’ll never know, but I have no regrets.

Now, myy values have definitely changed, but my life has changed too. I was able to have the career that I wanted, raise my kids close to family, leverage my community to raise myself. Certainly, that would have all gone differently if we had moved to Hawaii then. Perhaps it would have all worked out, but in a way that I could not picture.

This was a longer-than-usual essay – thanks for hanging in to the end. I hope this story illustrates how important it is to consider the values that are driving your decisions, and practice speaking about them to your friends and family and certainly to anyone you need to make big decisions with. Starting living your life according to your values, and you may be able to live with no regrets.