What are Your Individual Five Year Plans?

 If you do not know where you are headed, how will you know you have arrived?

We reach a place in our later years – the midlife crisis – when we look back at all we have achieved and measure it against what we have left to do before the clock runs out. If these are far apart, panic sets in. Who will we blame? Maybe ourselves, but it’s far easier to blame the partner that talked us into selling our sports car because it would not hold a car seat. The stereotypical image of someone going through a midlife crisis is someone ditching responsibility in favour of fun. If this is not how you want to end up, a good place to start is an open dialogue about the map you have for the future.

Just as you would not start a trip without a destination in mind, before you set off on a journey with a partner you need to be sure you are both travelling in the same direction. In general, we spend more time setting goals and checking off tasks at our work then we do in our personal life or even our most important relationships. It is easy to get complacent and lose sight of the finite nature of time.

It is not an unusual question to be asked at a job interview what your five year plan is. An employer does not want to spend time training someone if they are only going to be around for a year. While we are not, or should not, be in a relationship to train this person to meet your needs, we do want to be together for the long haul. If it is clear from the beginning your ideas are extremely conflicting, you either need to each adjust course somewhat so you both end up somewhere you want or break up. If one of you gives up your dreams and settles, will you resent the relationship down the road?

Sit down and write a couples’ bucket list or five year plan. Dr. Gail Matthews found you are forty-two percent more likely to achieve them as a result of cooperative planning. Make your list full of items that are concrete and measurable. ‘Have a happy marriage’ as a goal can look different depending on your background, temperament, and personality. It is better to state, 'date night every Friday' or 'save twenty dollars every week for a trip to Paris'. If you are both honest and paint a picture of the must achieve and the might be cool items, you are less likely to falter down the line.

Some of us are planners, long-term thinkers. We plan out our days, weeks, months, and years, making endless lists. Dierks Bentley wrote a song called Free and Easy that perfectly describes the short term thinker. These are people who like to be spontaneous, who find planning every detail claustrophobic. Those with an explorer personality type likely fall into this category. Two spontaneous partners will likely skip this exercise, finding it not in line with how they want to live life, not caring what is just around the corner, seeing even crisis as adventure. They may have a wonderful, exciting life together. People do not have to plan; the issue becomes problematic when one is a planner and the other isn’t or when our plans are extremely divergent and we have not had a conversation before the wedding about where we are headed.

If you have seen the other person's life map, compromise is possible. If both want to get a degree, but there is not money to cover both, one can work and the other attend school and then switch. If one wants kids right away, but the other to travel for two years, maybe you only travel together for one. As each goal is met, a life-long open dialogue can help you to build new goals to work towards.

This wild passion you feel for each other will not always be there. Life steps in in the form of mortgage, bills, and housework. You may have felt at the beginning that the fiery love you feel for each other will melt away all troubles. You can’t enter it blindly, just expecting it will not take work. Goals, in any area of our life, focus our attention. If you do not figure out what you want to be when you grow up, you will spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly while you figure it out. Having goals also keeps you focused on your relationship and nurturing it. Nothing grows if it is not nurtured.