For more than 27 years, Brad and Kate Aldrich have been building a marriage together. Along the way, they have experienced much of what makes marriage beautiful, and much of what can make it incredibly difficult.
Their own journey has included seasons of connection and disconnection, hurt and healing, raising four children, navigating change, and discovering that loving one another well requires more than simply learning better communication skills.
It requires becoming curious about the stories each person brings into the relationship. That discovery has shaped not only their own marriage, but the work they now do with couples.
Two people. Two stories.
Within every couple are two individual stories. Long before you met your partner, each of you was learning something about relationships. You learned what happens when people disagree. Whether emotions are welcomed. Whether needs are safe to express. What love looks like. What happens when someone disappoints you. How conflict gets resolved, or doesn’t. What it means to trust someone, depend on someone, desire someone, or risk being fully known.
Then you fell in love with someone who has an entirely different story. Marriage brings those stories together.
Maybe you’ve shared the details of those places of wounds, but couples rarely can see how those stories show up in their daily lives.
Brad and Kate help couples slow those patterns down and become curious about the stories underneath them. Instead of simply asking, “How do we stop having this argument?” they help couples begin asking deeper questions:
- How is my spouse’s story showing up when we get here?
- Why does this moment feel so threatening?
- How does my response make sense considering my story?
- And what would it look like to experience one another differently?
A couple walking with a couple
One of the most distinctive parts of Brad and Kate’s work is simple: you don’t have just one person sitting with your relationship. You have a couple.
Brad and Kate work together with couples, bringing two perspectives, two personalities, and the experience of their own long marriage into the room. That creates a different kind of space.
At times, Brad may recognize something happening in one partner while Kate notices something different in the other. One may stay with the story of one spouse while the other helps their partner understand what is happening inside them.
Sometimes couples simply benefit from seeing another couple sit with the complexity of their marriage without taking sides or deciding who is right.
Brad and Kate aren’t there as the couple who has figured marriage out. They come as two people who know from their own story that marriage can hold tremendous beauty and tremendous pain, and that meaningful healing is possible. Their role is to become curious alongside you.
Our own marriage story
Brad and Kate’s passion for couples work is deeply personal. Some of their earliest work in marriage ministry grew out of healing within their own relationship. Their experience led them to begin writing publicly about marriage through One Flesh Marriage and eventually to create the Still Becoming One podcast.
What began as sharing what they were learning grew into years of working with couples through coaching, counseling, groups, workshops, writing, speaking, and intensive experiences.
Their marriage continues to inform their work, not because they believe their relationship should become a model for someone else’s, but because they know what it is like to discover that the person you love has a story you don’t fully understand. They also know what it is like to discover new things about your own story after years of marriage.
That experience has given them tremendous hope for couples. You can know someone for decades and still discover more of who they are.
