Setting Marriage Goals: Building a Shared Vision for a Strong Partnership
Marriage is a journey, a beautiful intertwining of two individuals' lives into a shared future. However, amidst the romance and excitement, it's crucial to remember that successful marriages are built on more than just love alone. They require careful planning, communication, and shared goals to thrive.
Marriage goals are the cornerstone of a healthy and fulfilling partnership. They encompass not only practical aspirations, such as buying a house or raising a family, but also the emotional and relational aspects of the union. From the promise of honesty to the way we treat each other on a daily basis, these goals shape the foundation of our marriage.
In marriage, there is an interesting and complex balance of the individual and the team. Too much independence creates a foundation of disconnection that makes relationships unsustainable, but too much intersection can cause emotional instability and attempts to control each other. We’re used to looking at the individual part and making goals for ourselves within the context of our marriages – New Year’s Resolutions are a great example. But in terms of the team, it’s common to default – sometimes unintentionally – to a fairytale lens, where picking and choosing the right person automatically creates a bright and desired future. As much as we’re delighted by fairytales and rom coms (i.e. modern fairytales), they are not real, and our relationship requires that we create a shared vision of what we want to be the case. For most of us, our vows are the only time in our marriage that we set intentions and state them together. And yet even vows are concepts we develop as individuals that we then put into the space of our relationship instead of goals we create together. So many of us have never thought about this or done it, even though it’s extremely important.
Aside from the fact we get our relationship standards from the media, fictional stories, and our families – which on average are not grounded in reality, practical, or lead toward successful, long-term partnerships – we tend not to think about relationship goals also because it almost seems ridiculous. Isn’t it implied that we want to have a good relationship and that is the goal? The issue is that a “good relationship” does not look the same for every person. You may have differences in values that you need to intersect, or may disagree as to what ways of interacting create a good relationship – for example sharing all feelings versus processing internally. Additionally, in our modern world, the options for what life can be like are vast, so being in a marriage in no way implies that your visions for the future are that close together. Often we’ll fall in love hard and assume the rest is handled, when in fact research shows that creating a shared vision of your future is an essential part of feeling connected and having a strong relationship.
To set marriage goals, it should begin with a no-pressure brainstorm. You can come up with some prompts that speak to both concrete desires and emotional ones. For example, “When you think about what our dream life would be, what comes to mind?” You’ll see where you agree and differ. You don’t need to want exactly the same things. Maybe you instead aim to meet both visions in some way over time. You can also ask, “When you imagine us in our fairytale relationship, how are we treating each other and feeling about ourselves? What do we do and what do we avoid?” The idea is to get both practical goals like how and where you live, and relational goals like how you get to feel inside the relationship and how you are with each other.
It’s crucial to understand that all relationship goals are guesses. When you get married, you’ll have been together a proportionately tiny amount of time given the commitment you are making – say three years of dating and assuming 50 years of marriage. You should think of your intentions and goals as something to iterate over time and continue to revisit. When you’re marrying someone, you’re not marrying your favorite version of them frozen in time; you’re marrying someone’s entire life journey, as you’re going on your own. This, it turns out, is an extremely complex process. You need to create goals, then check in about them regularly, and allow for them to change as you grow together.
