Quite often we come across credos such as “Don’t dream your life, live your dream”? One classical dream people used to have was to get married and live happily ever after, but that dream seldom becomes reality these days; instead it ends before its original intention. Today we feel encouraged to pursue our very personal goals and chase our dreams, but this can easily conflict with the fact that some of our dreams can only be realized mutually.
To align one’s personal dreams and aims with that of another person’s, in particular a loved one, becomes a difficult and complex task. The question of priorities and whether arrangements can be made to accommodate both partners is difficult yet it should not be the stumbling stone for relationships intended to pursue a mutual dream of a happy marriage. If both partners are willing to make the necessary sacrifices and show the necessary commitment it is no mission impossible them even if the scenario is as complex as the one sketched out below:
They have been together for quite some time, more than two years. Considering the average longevity of relationships in their age group – which often does not exceed a couple of months – this alone can already be regarded as a remarkable accomplishment and so far things have been working out just fine. They have managed to avoid the usual troubles, their partnership has never been threatened by jealousy, or the fear of betrayal and they both feel comfortable talking to each other before any problem really poses a threat to what they share.
He wants to travel – alone. He wants to pursue sports with a passion and he plans to go abroad to further his studies and gain some experience living abroad. Whilst he has all those plans he claims she is playing a vital and important role in all of his plans, but somehow, understandably, she feels left out and excluded.
She wants him. She has numerous interests and even shares some of his. She is very much into arts and loves to travel. She has a career of her own and is as ambitious as he is, but her future plans do not encompass geographical distances and even though she loves travelling she does not want to have to travel to see him.
Yet, despite the mature handling of their relationship his plans bother her and leave her puzzled about how to handle them and what to make of them. Talking to her friends she hardly feels understood, because most of her friends do not seem to realize that her problem is different in a way, or perhaps it is not even a different problem but they are different from most other couple she knows. Because what she is usually told sounds like this: “Forget about it, girl. By the time his plane takes off he has probably forgotten about you, if he hasn’t been cheating on you already.” And normally when she is in the mood to defend him her answers read like this “No, he’s just different and what we have is something special. Plus, I know for certain that he has never cheated on me. Although I know that most men are not sincere and faithful.”
Thus she sometimes feels tired of having the same discussions without feeling misunderstood by her conversation partners. She thinks that might be because she hardly knows any couple with a lasting relationship. From her perspective, their relationship is one of the very few that she sees on the way to a happy and long lasting marriage. She admires his ambitions and highly values the fact that he has aims. Nonetheless she is anxious that his goals lie so far away that they could create a distance and gap between what their love would be able to bridge.
He admires her, especially for her empathy and understanding nature. He cherishes her more than anything else, and he acknowledges that he struck lotto when he got this girl to be his spouse. To do the right thing in any situation has always been his main objective and for a while he has found it easy to tell right from wrong, but at this phase in his life things have become complicated and he has a hard time setting up priorities. An opportunity to study abroad is something he knows his parents sacrificed a lot for and something he always wanted to do.
Now what looks like a dilemma could just be the ultimate test of this couple’s relationship and a question of whether they have found the right one in each other. A hard test to pass, a test of faith, commitment and patience but if both of them can convince each other with the idea that this separation is merely spatial and only for a limited time, it might even strengthen their relationship and no one will blame the other for crushing the other’s dream.