My First Marriage Had No Goals

You’ve set goals for your career.
You’ve set goals for your fitness.
Your income.
Probably your year, your quarter, and your week.

Now think about your marriage. Or your relationship.

What are the goals there?

If anything comes to mind at all, it’s probably something like this...

Buy the house.
Get to a certain financial position.
Move to a certain city.
Have kids… or another one.

All of those are real. But notice what they have in common.

They’re things you want to achieve together.

They say nothing at all about how the two of you actually operate with each other.

Here’s the reframe that changed things for me.

In any relationship, there aren’t two parties. There are three.

There’s you.
There’s your partner.
And there’s the relationship itself, sitting between the two of you.

That third party is almost invisible. It has no voice. Nobody advocates for it. And it’s the one that determines whether the whole thing survives.

The goals I’m talking about belong to that third party.

Not what you want to build together... how you intend to be with each other while you build it.

Things like…

How do we raise a difficult topic?
How do we communicate when something’s wrong?
How do we make decisions about our life when we are not aligned?
What happens when one of us is upset and the other hasn’t noticed?
What do we do when we disagree at 10pm at night?

That last one sounds trivial. It isn’t.

Because one person in that scenario needs it resolved before they can sleep. The other needs space to process and can address it properly in the morning.

Neither is wrong. They’re just different.

But with no goals in place, that difference becomes a fight. Every single time. And it’s never actually about the original issue.

I know this because I’ve been on the other side of it.

My first marriage ended. Amy’s first marriage ended too.

And when we met, we both recognised the same gap.

Neither of us had ever had any of this in place.

No goals.
No agreements.
No rules of engagement.
Nothing that told us how to handle each other when it got hard.

So we set them within the first month of meeting.

Nine months later we came head to head with COVID, locked in a house together, in a brand new relationship, with everything uncertain.

That was the ultimate test. And the goals held.

Seven years on, they’ve shifted and evolved, but the structure has been there the entire time. And they’ve done more for us than any shared ambition ever has.

Because shared ambitions tell you where you’re going.

Rules of engagement tell you how you’ll survive the trip.

And this isn’t only marriage.

Every relationship that matters has this invisible third party.

Business partnerships.
Co-founders.
The relationship with your kids as they get older.

In every one of them, the same question applies.

Have you ever set goals about how you’ll operate when it gets difficult? Or are you just hoping you’ll both handle it well in the moment?

Because hoping is what people do right up until the moment it stops working.

So here’s what I challenge you to sit down and do this week.

Take the relationship that matters most to you.

And instead of talking about what you want to achieve together, have a genuine conversation about how you want to be with each other.

Write it down. Agree on it. Revisit it every week.

Because the business can be rebuilt.
The money can be earned again.
The career can be started over somewhere else.

This relationship can’t.​

If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.