Every person in the world has a unique personality, with hopes, dreams, and goals for their life. These goals could be related to your love life, like your hopes to get married and start a family. Or maybe they’re related to your career, hopes of getting a raise, promotion, or moving teams or companies. They could even be financial goals for saving or buying a new home, or fitness goals for losing a certain amount of weight or being able to achieve a new personal best on a race or lift.
These help to define us and help us imagine our life is going to be. Whether you’re single, dating, or in a relationship, you have goals for yourself that you hope to achieve. But what happens when another party is involved?
When you get into a relationship, you and your partner must find a way to balance one another’s goals. It’s about being independent, but also giving and receiving support for and from your partner. In fact, coordinating life goals with your partner makes you more likely to achieve them. Let’s find out how.
Promotes Open and Honest Communication
Communication is key in all types of relationships. Having that trust within your partner and your relationship to openly and honestly talk about one another’s hopes, dreams, failures, fears, and successes can help strengthen that existing bond that you share together. Being transparent with each other can help you both come up with ways to support one another without sacrificing your own hopes and dreams. Together, you can reach a mutual and beneficial understanding and resolution that aligns with both of your visions for the future, independently and jointly.
Emotional Support
Not only does coordinating your life goals with your partner promote open and honest communication, but it’s also a great way to have an emotional support buddy. Goals are not linear. The path towards reaching goals comes with a lot of ups and downs along the way. If you and your partner are aware of the goals and steps that you each are taking to reach those goals, you can be one another’s support system through the good and challenging times. Being one another’s emotional support system means cheering for them when they accomplish their goals, but also during the process of start to finish.
Increased Motivation and Accountability
Having an emotional support buddy in your partner can help support you and also increase your motivation towards reaching those goals. Accomplishing goals can take time, and you may not always have the full motivation and drive to reach those goals, especially when challenges come along. Knowing that your partner has similar goals and is striving to reach them as well can help you continue to put in the effort and work to reach your goals. Plus, you and your partner can also be one another’s accountability buddies to help each other stay focused and on track.
United Front
Coordinating life goals with one another is just another way to create a stronger bond together. When you and your partner have goals that align with one another, you’re building a shared vision for yourself, your relationship, and your future moving forward. Building this together ensures that you can still maintain your individualism while finding compromises to work together.
Next Steps
Counseling is often viewed as a last-ditch effort to save a relationship. In reality, it’s something that can help even the healthiest of relationships build and grow together. No matter what stage you’re at in your life or with your partner, relationships are complex. You and your partner won’t always have all the answers for everything that life throws your way. Premarital counseling can help you and your partner learn how to better communicate with one another. Reach out today to learn more about how couples counseling can benefit you.
