When I was growing up, my parents liked to tell a story about how they got married. It’s a Romeo and Juliet story where both their parents were against them marrying so young. So at 18, they took a bus to South Carolina, where it was legal to marry at 18, got married by a local justice of the peace, and returned back to New York on the bus with a matrimonial meal of splitting a hot dog. When I was 20, I did the same, eloping not to South Carolina but Michigan, where they didn’t require you to be 21 to marry without parental permission.

Our lives are filled with stories that shape how we view life, our past, and how we imagine our future. The ones that I think have the most impact are the stories we hear from our parents, our own stories about our childhoods, and the stories we create from times of transition and struggle. Here’s the impact of each type:

I think I eloped like my parents because they gave me that option. This is one of the things that parents’ stories offer—stories of divorce or affairs, quitting or not quitting jobs, taking or not taking risks, showing or not showing emotions, talking or not talking about problems. Some stories tell us what to strive........

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