Have you ever considered creating real relationship goals to protect and enhance your love with your spouse or partner?
Ask anyone who is married or in a committed relationship what their number one priority is, and the majority of people will say, “My partner/spouse.”
But as important as our love relationships are to our health and happiness, it is curious how little time we spend taking care of them.
If you are married or in a committed partnership, stop for a moment and consider the amount of time you spend actively working to strengthen it.
If it’s not much, you certainly aren’t alone.
When we first become a couple, it feels like the intoxicating fuel of infatuation will power your closeness forever.
What Are Relationship Goals?
Relationship goals mean the experience, aim, or lesson that the couple wants to achieve. Relationship goals set the target for every relationship to look forward to and lay the foundation of a stronger, healthier bond.
Why Setting Relationship Goals Can Be a Good Thing?
In the many years that I have been counseling troubled couples on how they can improve their marriage relationship and maintain intimacy in their relationship, one thing has become increasingly clear:
Many couples don’t know the first thing about truly nurturing a relationship and setting relationship goals.
For example, I have met some husbands who thought that by earning enough money, they had fulfilled their primary role in the relationship.
I also met quite a few women who had focused too much on caring for their children at the expense of a great relationship with their husbands.
So how can you improve the status of your marriage relationship?
You can start to revitalize your relationship and marriage as soon as you learn about the essential basics of a good relationship i.e., set relationship goals.
5 Most Important Things in a Relationship
When you think about goals for your relationship, consider what these goals are leading to. Of course, you want a happy, healthy, loving connection. But what are the specific outcomes that ensure you have this kind of connection. Let’s look at the top 5 that you want your goals to support.
Healthy Communication
You and your partner should feel safe sharing and talking, even during conflict, in a way that doesn’t undermine each other or the relationship.
Trust
You both need to feel you can completely trust the other and that neither of you will betray the sacred trust in your relationship.
Boundaries
You both are free to have personal boundaries as individuals, and you both commit to honoring the other person’s boundaries.
Mutual Respect
You treat one another with utmost deference, dignity, and kindness and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, needs, and boundaries.
Mutual Support
You are each other’s number one person in good times and bad, and you are the first to offer support and love. You have each others’ backs and can rely on each other.
Immediate and Short Term Relationship Goals
Let’s begin with some of the most effective goals you can implement in your relationship to strengthen your bond and ensure the health and longevity of your connection. Consider starting on these goals right away, beginning with the one that seems most critical in your relationship.
Prioritize Each Other
Let’s be honest — most of us talk a big game about the importance of our marriage or love relationship, but when the rubber meets the road, we aren’t really putting the each other first.
Over time, you begin to take one another for granted.
You get busy and distracted with your own stuff and neglect to tune in to the needs and desires of your partner.
You view your coupling as a given, something that’s just a byproduct of your connection to this other person.
But the pairing is an entity on its own. There’s you. There’s your partner. And there’s the relationship.
Of these three, the relationship should be in first place. In fact, it should be in first place over everything else in your life, including your children, work, hobbies, or extended family.
So the goal here must be a mutual one. You both must embrace each other as the centerpiece of your life. How do you do that?
- It’s a commitment you have to reinforce every single day in all of your decisions and actions.
- It requires constant recalibration based on the needs of each other and what is going on in your lives.
Create a Couple Bubble
Relationship expert and author, Stan Tatkin, focuses on the importance of creating a “couple bubble.”
A couple bubble reinforces the goal of prioritizing your connection by thinking in terms of “we” rather than “me.”
This is hard for most couples because it requires viewing yourself as part of a team first, above your independent needs and habits.
But rather than this inter-dependence weakening you, it strengthens you because each person feels safe and cherished.
The first step toward reaching this goal is making a series of agreements together that reinforce your care and protection of the relationship.
An example of this might be stating, “I will never intentionally frighten you or leave you,” or “I will treat your vulnerabilities with dignity and care.”
A couple bubble goal also involves:
- Becoming experts on each other’s needs, desires, and fears.
- Repairing damage to the relationship quickly.
- Building up a reservoir of happy memories to counter any difficulties.
- Being each other’s rock during difficult times.
Have Daily Connection Time
An important daily goal for your relationship is spending one-on-one time together to reconnect.
If one or both of you work outside of the home, it’s especially important to carve out this time without distractions or interruptions (from children or otherwise).
Try to do this both in the morning before the workday begins and in the evening before you are pulled away to chores and responsibilities.
This is not the time to work through conflict or discuss your issues. It is a time for talking, sharing, embracing, and simply enjoying each other’s company.
Look in each other’s eyes. Hold hands. Listen attentively as the other is talking.
In the morning, you might share some time talking in bed before you get up or over a cup of coffee. In the evening, you might take a walk together or send the kids outside to play while you sit and catch up on your day.
This connection time doesn’t need to be hours long. Even fifteen or twenty minutes is enough to reinforce how much you care about each other.
Communicate with Kindness
Couples goal-setting must include the ways you communicate together. But have you ever noticed how couples can speak to each other with such cruelty and unkindness?
They say things to each other that they’d never dream of saying to a casual acquaintance or even someone they don’t like.
When we feel hurt, angry, or frustrated, it’s so easy to lash out and say hurtful things. Sometimes we employ passive-aggressive words and behaviors, using subtle digs, manipulation, or stonewalling to express how we feel.
Both overt and covert words and behaviors like these are deeply wounding, and over time they accumulate enough to cause serious problems in a relationship. You lose trust, mutual respect, and eventually love.
Make it a goal to be kind in all of your communication. Being kind doesn’t mean you have to agree with each other or even feel loving during a challenging moment.
It does mean you agree to avoid attacking, insulting, or intentionally wounding each other. It means you speak forthrightly without using passive or manipulative behaviors.
It means you step away or count to ten when you feel like lashing out, knowing that you don’t want to say or do something you’ll later regret.
We are all human, and of course, there will be times you fall short of your kindness goal. But make it a goal to apologize quickly, offer forgiveness quickly, and reset your kindness goal as soon as possible.
Embrace Vulnerability
Each partner enters a relationship with past baggage, insecurities, feelings of shame or guilt, and tenuous hopes and dreams. We have vulnerabilities that we want to hide from others so they don’t think less of us.
As trust and intimacy grow with each other, you share some of your vulnerabilities and inner pain with your partner.
You expose your soft underbelly in hopes of finding a place of safety and security where you can be yourself completely.
The ability to be safely vulnerable with one another can strengthen the bond between you and foster a deeper love and intimacy than you thought possible.
When your partner embraces your vulnerabilities and treats them with dignity, it can heal wounds from the past and make you feel more confident in who you are.
Make it a goal to be completely open, vulnerable, and real with each other. But more importantly, make it a goal to always treat one another’s vulnerabilities with tender loving care.
Plan for Fun Together
Life is already serious and stressful. Your days are spent working, caring for children, running errands, dealing with problems, and worrying about future problems.
Your relationship should be a place of peace and respite from the tribulations of daily life. In fact, your relationship should provide an outlet for enjoying life to the fullest.
Think back to the time when you first met your spouse or love partner and how much fun you had together.
At that early stage of your love, you didn’t have to work too hard to have fun. Everything was fun, and you delighted in finding fun things to do together.
As your closeness has matured, you may need to work a bit harder to create fun times together, but it is still possible.
Communication, conflict resolution, and relationship satisfaction according to several studies.
Make it a goal to schedule time for fun and play every week. Sit down with your spouse to discuss what you both consider fun activities. Be open to trying new things that might differ from your initial ideas of fun.
Allow yourselves to be silly and act like kids again. Even small, spontaneous moments of fun can enhance your relationship and bring you closer.
Understand Your Love Languages
In his book, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, author Gary Chapman outlines five ways that people express and experience love. They include:
- gift-giving
- quality time
- words of affirmation
- actions of service
- physical touch
Chapman asserts that each of us has a primary and secondary love language that is expressed in the way we show love to others.
But by showing our own love language to our partner, we are revealing our deepest needs within the relationship.
For example, if you are especially affectionate with your partner, it shows that you crave physical affection from him or her.
Each of you may not have the same love language, and that’s why it’s so important that you both learn and support each other’s love language.
You can do that by observing how your partner shows love to you and by analyzing what he or she complains about within the relationship.
Another way to learn about your love languages is by taking love languages quiz and sharing the results with each other.
Once you are both aware of each other’s love language, your goal is to offer your partner more of what he or she needs in the relationship.
Maintain a Satisfying Sex Life
No matter how great your sex life was at the beginning of your relationship, it is inevitable that it will grow boring or even burdensome from time to time.
If you are fifteen or twenty years into a marriage, maintaining that romantic spark can take real effort and commitment. But a healthy sex life is vital to a healthy relationship.
Women need to feel secure and comfortable with their partner in order to be willing to try new things and be sexually adventurous.
Men need more visual stimulation and variety than women do.
For women, sex can become a stressor if they see it as yet another chore they have to accomplish.
Men see sex as a stress reliever and need this physical connection to feel closeness.
The key to bridging these differences in sexual needs is regular communication.
Talking about your sex life may feel uncomfortable at first, but communicating your needs and concerns will protect your relationship from potential problems that can further damage your intimacy.
Make it a goal to discuss your sex life on a weekly basis. Be honest with each other about what you desire, what isn’t working well, and what you fantasize about.
Work toward making your relationship feel safe, comfortable, and connected, and try to negotiate a compromise in areas of differing needs.
Support One Another’s Goals
As important as it is to create a couple bubble in your relationship, you are two individuals who have goals and dreams of your own. Having your own goals and dreams doesn’t undermine your connection as a couple.
On the contrary, it should enhance your relationship, as each partner has something unique and interesting to bring to the relationship.
Both of you should feel that the most important person in your life — your spouse or partner — supports and admires your goals and wants to celebrate your achievements.
Make it a goal to discuss your individual goals and dreams and how you can make those goals happen with each other.
Ask each other questions like, “What can I do to support your goals?”
Have a Yearly Review
If you and your spouse take the time to set relationship goals and work toward achieving them, then it’s important to measure the success of your efforts.
At the end of the year, sit down together to discuss each of the goals you have defined for your relationship.
- What have you done in the past year to actualize those goals?
- How successful have you been?
- What do you need to keep working on?
Use this time to set new goals for the coming year that build on what you have achieved and what you’ve learned about one another in the previous year.
Spice Up Your Date Nights
If you balked at the word “maintain”, it’s time to put the spice back into your one-on-one time. And if there’s not enough of that, now’s the time to make it a priority.
It’s not just about getting along well for the kids. That won’t be enough to keep your marriage bond strong. And whether you admit it or not, you’ll both be miserable if the closest you get to intimacy is giving each other a quick, goodnight peck on the lips.
So, schedule a regular date night and let nothing but a real emergency mess with that commitment. And if you’re not sure what to do to reconnect and pave the road to greater intimacy, it can’t hurt to brainstorm ideas together and make it fun.
What can you do this week to remind yourself and your spouse of the fun times you had when you first started dating? What date activity will make you closer than you have been for a while?
Maybe your spouse is still in the dark as to what turns you on, but you probably aren’t.
The best time to share that information without making your spouse feel pressured is during these private dates — whether you’re chatting together in your bedroom or talking over a drink at a favorite restaurant.
In fact, the more you can make your spouse feel special and worth at least some trouble, the more likely you both are to make inroads and start building — or rebuilding — a connection.
And with that in place, if you’re both open to greater intimacy, it’s not hard to get a fire going. Then you can work to maintain it.
Create a Couple’s Journal
Get a journal and write a letter in it to your spouse, sharing your thoughts and concerns and expressing your hopes for your relationship.
- Write about what you love about your spouse and what you’d love to do as a couple.
- Write about how much fun you’ve had and what you hope you can still enjoy as you grow old together.
- Then let your spouse read your entry and write one of his or her own.
Journaling as a couple can begin as part of couple’s counseling and become a regular part of your DIY couple’s therapy.
Keeping a journal together and making it a safe place to be honest about what you’re thinking and feeling can draw you both closer together and enable you to help each other work through personal challenges.
There’s solid science behind the benefits of journaling for an individual’s mental health, and when two are involved — particularly two who are committed to each other’s well-being — the compounded benefits can only help strengthen their relationship.
