Address Book Questions

Hello everyone. Over the last few weeks, we have slowly been converting to Apples- we've picked up the new iPads and new iPhones. As soon as the iMacs are ready, that should wrap it up for us.

Right now, both me and my wife use separate gmail accounts and have them synced to our own iPad/iPhones.

My question is once we get the iMac, we want to start utilizing our icloud accounts and will import our contacts to the icloud from google. How will we keep our address books separate? We don't want to join our contacts into one address book. Is this done by logging into our individual apple user ids? Right now we are using just one apple user id for the convenience of downloading apps, etc. Or will we have to maintain separate 'groups' in the address book? Suggestions?

Also, is 'linking' contacts in the apple address book the same as 'merging' contacts in google?

Thanks.

You can set up the Mac with separate users which will keep all of your stuff separate.

kbent's suggest would be by far the best approach.