goals in marriage

This indirectly builds off a short post from earlier about communication in marriage.

I should note that this is not about some specific discussion or argument that Golden and I are having.  This is about me reflecting on how our approaches and motivations have been very different throughout our lives together, and we have not always identified that fact.

When I was seventeen, a Holiness pastor and general contractor I worked for told me something that irritated me at the time, but I have grown to understand.  He told me that romantic relationships at my age at the time were unwise because someone that age doesn't even know what he wants.  While I believe that God intentionally designed people to be very interested in the opposite sex at that time in life, I think my former boss was right about not knowing what you want at that stage of life.

I think the most difficult lesson that I have learned in marriage that has been that different people have different goals in life, and aligning them can be difficult or impossible.  It sounds so straightforward and easy to address, right?  Goals seem like obvious things that can be discussed with a future spouse and potential landmines diffused very early in the relationship.  It isn't so simple, though.  Goals like wanting a house or a certain number of kids by a certain age, or to make a certain amount of money or to own certain big-ticket items are only the tip of the iceberg when compared to the wants and motivations from which they are derived.

I'll pick an example that doesn't apply to Golden and me.  A couple may agree that they want to buy a house by a specific age.  While it will appear to both parties that they are in significant agreement, there is still far more not agreed on than agreed on.  What type of house do you agree you are going to buy?  Does one spouse want to buy a fixer-upper and fix it up and the other not want to spend the time?  Does one spouse prefer to spend on form and the other to spend on function?  Do the spouses agree on how much they will put down and who is ultimately responsible for coming up with the down payment, mortgage, upkeep, insurance, and taxes?  Does one spouse expect new furniture and decorations for the new house?  How hard and fast is that age limit?

This is only scratching the surface, but where one spouse assumes that they agreed to a smaller house with a big yard and a two-car garage that both spouses would work to save on until they got a 50% down payment even if it takes a few more years, the other might think they agreed to buying a split-level in a specific color with four bedrooms, two baths, and a good-sized kitchen with a 10% down payment or whatever they happen to have in savings at the age in question.  No one is more at fault than another in this scenario, but all of these little assumptions that one party had that the other did not will lead to both parties feeling like the other is not holding up their end of the agreement.  "He said we could buy a house when I turned thirty," and/or, "She said we would both sacrifice until we could afford a nice house," will lead to arguments and resentment.

So, all we need to do is be ultra-detailed in laying out our life goals, then come to a consensus about how to get there, right?  That's much better than before, but it's still not enough.

As I noted before, at least in my personal experience, even when you know what you want in life, you don't really know what you want in life.  You may think you want to be rich, but what you really want is peace, and what is necessary to reach a specific salary by a specific age causes more net anxiety than being moderately poor.  You may think you want to have a house full of kids, but you really are just drawn to always nurturing a baby, and when your kids get older you feel less fulfilled and more and more exhausted.  You may think you want to continue learning or improve your marketability, but you really want the honor and respect that comes from a graduate-level degree and letters after your name.  The long and short of it is that if you do not really know what you want your spouse does not know either, and any discussion about life goals without self-awareness is going to be incomplete.

Another pitfall is that it is easy to ignore potential differences in what you want in everyday life because any rational person would agree that it's important.  This is where I place the whole women want to talk about their day and men want to mentally shut down at the end of their day.  She thinks that, of course, any rational person would want to talk about their day; and he thinks that, of course, any rational person would want some down time. Any rational person would agree that spending time with the kids is more important than working overtime, and any rational person would agree that working overtime to pay the mortgage to put a roof over the kids' head is more important than a game of catch.  Any rational person would lease a car so as to always be able to drive something nice and classy, and any rational person would purchase and own a car for ten years or more to avoid constant car payments.  Any rational person would agree with you about a plethora of things.

Something further that I am still grasping is that, while spouses should work on goals together, it is not one spouse' responsibility to assure that the other spouse's goals are all met.  This is hard for me for a number of reasons, some of them rational and some not.  It seems to make sense that if you put all of your relational eggs in one basket for life, so to say, that the other person has some responsibility to help you be fulfilled, but this can in reality be a horrible burden to place on someone and a horrible burden to accept.  Some life goals simply are not possible, or impose too great a burden on the spouse or family.  Some goals will be mutually exclusive with the other spouse's goals.

All of this comes back to the inability to communicate when you are both speaking different languages, and the importance of learning the other person's language.  I think that God devised relationships in this way to help us grow in ways that we could not otherwise, and the effort necessary to learn the other person's perspective and language is a big part of that growing process.  Either that, or all of this relational confusion exists for His amusement.  I'm going with the first option, though.