Marriage Goals – 4 Steps To Creating A Relationship You Love

Marriage goals are unlike any other kind of goals that most of us make. 

Unlike all those all-to-familiar resolutions that focus on doing something for yourself, your marriage goals should strengthen and enhance your relationship. While most goals focus on one person, marriage goals should be about both people and improving the relationship. 

In this video, I discuss relationship goals and how to create them for your marriage.

Resources From The Video:

Intimacy Deck Game and Access the Save Your Marriage Workbook.

When you create relationship goals that you and your partner agree to and feel good about – you’ll be divorce-proofing your marriage while increasing the shared bond. The key here is that your marriage goals are agreeable to both partners.  

Scientific research out of the University of Washington and the Gottman Institute on marital success found that shared dreams are a key to a happy marriage. This data makes creating marriage goals all the more powerful for your relationship. 

As you can see in the image below, a healthy relationship dynamic is built on friendship, healthy conflict management, and shared dreams. 

Let’s use this image as guidance to help you create a shared dream with your partner. Further, to help you generate marriage goals that work to strengthen your marriage holistically. 

As you’ll find – creating a stronger friendship, sharing fondness and admiration, and building a shared meaning can happen when you properly make marriage goals. For this reason, in this article, we’ll also look at how to build a vision as a couple for your relationship.

Below you’ll find 21 Marriage Goal ideas, and below that, you’ll learn how to create marriage goals with your partner. 

Take note that engaged couples can also benefit from discussing marriage goals and asking each other important questions before getting married.

21 Marriage Goals For Every Couple 

This list provides 21 marriage goals examples you can reference when creating your own.

1. Create open and honest communication and check in on your relationship regularly
2. Get on the same page with finances 
3. Create a shared financial vision for the future 
4. Openly appreciate each other more often 
5. Listen to each other so we both feel valued and heard
6. Create a savings account for our dream to buy a house, a new car (or whatever else) 
7. Have regular date nights and special evenings together as a couple 
8. See each other’s families more often 
9. Have sex more often (and address any challenges with sexual desire)
10. Spend more time with other couples
11. Take up new hobbies and interests as a couple 
12. Create a vision for our retirement and start working towards that future 
13. Explore our sexuality together  
14. Create more and deeper intimacy 
15. Go to counseling as a couple 
16. Open up a shared banking account and create shared savings 
17. Get a pet
18. Create a plan to have a child (or adopt) 
19. Take a trip abroad, or somewhere we’ve never been to before 
20. Take a class together (like dance, art, or something new)  
21. Find new ways to inject more fun and romance into the marriage 

The list of marriage goals can be endless. I designed these 21 goal ideas to help get your juices flowing. Every couple will have their ideas of what they’d like to accomplish – it’s not so much the goals that matter – it’s how you design and create them that matters.

With marriage goals, the most important part is creating unification, discussion, and more togetherness. Once you’re more together, you’ll find making and achieving your objectives will be simple.

To help you create healthy marriage goals that support your marriage – let’s look at the right the best way to create marriage goals. 

How To Create Marriage Goals With Your Partner 

Here are the steps to creating marriage goals.

Step One: Schedule Time To Create Marriage Goals 

The first step in creating marriage goals will be to spend some time talking. The only way that happens is if you schedule a time to be together. 

To create that vision and future together as a couple, begin by setting time aside with your partner. 

My advice is to schedule a date and let your partner know that you’d be excited to talk about dreams, hopes, and aspirations during your time together. 

Having the agreement to go out and share dreams can be fun and exciting and will make the anticipation of your date more intriguing. 

When we schedule time together, we’re one step closer to creating a vision for our relationship and future. 

As someone once said: 

“What gets scheduled gets done.”

If you’re reading this now, take a pause. Text, email, or call your partner into the room and say this:

“Hey. I’d like to know more about your dreams, aspirations, and hopes. Can we schedule a time to go out and do that? When would work for you?”

Before you read any further, send that text or email off. 

By letting your partner know you’d like to schedule time together, you are communicating that you want to see your spouse and get closer, and you’re sharing your love through an action that says:

“I like you. I’d like to see you. So let’s schedule some time to be together. You are important to me.” 

Send that text, email, or verbally ask your partner when you two can have time together. 

Once you have that date set, it’ll be easy to execute the rest of the steps below. 

Step 2: Ask Questions, Be Curious, Build Love Maps 

Creating marriage goals should be fun, exciting, and an opportunity to explore. 

With curiosity and questions, you can use this moment as a way to get to know your partner, dig into learning about her and create deeper intimacy. 

One of the keys to a successful marriage is creating ‘Love Maps.’ If you’re curious, a love map is created by asking questions and inquiring about your partner. The stronger your insights and knowledge are about your partner, the better you can navigate problem resolution and anything else.  

If you want to make a helpful love map (which you should), you must ask questions and get curious. 

For a great game to play to help in this process of making love maps, check out the Intimacy Deck. This game makes asking new and exciting questions simple and shows you how much you already know. 

Bring the Intimacy Cards to your date nights, and surprise your partner with a fun, scientifically proven game that helps couples get closer. 

If you know that you’d like to make specific marriage goals with your partner, consider the questions you’d like to ask your partner. The goal shouldn’t be to get your way. Instead, the objective is to learn about your spouse’s world and get closer. 

Step 3: Share Your Dreams Too  

Sometimes when working with couples, I find that one partner is reserved. 

While one spouse openly shares their dreams and goals with gusto – the other person keeps their hopes locked inside. 

When one person shares and the other doesn’t, it’s hard for both people to have their desires met. 

In this process, it’s essential you share your dreams and hopes. You can be curious, ask questions, and build love maps, and in turn – it helps if your partner does the same for you. 

In one online marriage counseling session, I recall this wonderful couple. They had two beautiful kids, had been together for a decade, and they came to me to improve their communication. 

During one of our sessions, we discussed the role of curiosity, love maps, and the power of asking questions to deepen intimacy. 

With gusto, they dove into using my Intimacy Game. 

When the wife asked her husband about his dream job, he said:

“The work I do is great. It feeds you and the kids.” 

Watching him, I could feel that he was holding back. So, with encouragement, I inquired:

“Steve, your dream job is to own a construction company? Or did you fall into that, and now it feeds the family.”

With some thought, he hesitated and then softly responded:

“Well, you know. I used to dream of being a truck driver. Of course, I know I can’t ever do that. I’d never want to leave my wife and my kids for days. But if I could do anything, I would drive a truck.”

Like a flash, his wife lit up. *I know it may not sound like much, but that new piece of information is fodder for more conversation, intimacy, and getting to know someone. 

Curious, his wife asked him more questions. 

“Why would you want to drive a truck? I didn’t know you liked driving so much. What about driving a truck do you like?” 

From there, he revealed how much he wanted to travel across the United States, that he liked being out on the road, and that even as a child, he loved big semi-trucks. 

As you can imagine, this tiny revelation led to new marriage goals. With that new data, they began to discuss a road trip, looking at big semi-trucks as a date and things they could do to help him enjoy his dream. Just one new piece of information can help couples bond and feel closer (even after decades of being married). 

Just like that couple discovered – in marriage goals, there is a space for your dreams and your partner’s goals, and there’s a place where all those visions merge to help make your marriage more amazing. 

Step 4: Take Small Steps Toward Your Dreams 

Now that you’ve discussed your dreams, goals, and visions as a couple – it’s time to take action. 

In the same way, this blog grows word by word, day by day, your marriage goals grow with small actions that make things happen. 

When you and your partner decide you’d like to buy a house, you likely won’t be able to plunk a few hundred thousand dollars or more and make that purchase. Instead, it will take many little actions. For example, creating savings, speaking to a real estate agent, looking at homes online, visiting homes you like in person, and many back-and-forth conversations. 

You make significant transformations by taking small daily or weekly actions toward your marriage goals. 

Small movements toward your desires are how you create what you want. 

No one reaches their destination with one big step; it happens in many tiny movements. 

As successful research from Cornell University put it: 

“Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.”

To achieve your goals, you and your partner will do well to consider:

• What are some small steps we can together to arrive at our goal? 
• Are there steps you’d like me to take to get us there? 
• What are some steps you’re committed to making? 
• What do we need to be like a focused laser beam?

Think of these questions as another way to build love maps. 

Finding your answers and discussing with your partner can be fun and insightful and help you two become a stronger couple. 

Once you’ve taken the time to answer these questions and you’ve done the love maps, you’ll find the actions come more naturally. Being a team will be more comfortable, and your marriage will blossom to new levels because you’ve created marriage goals thoughtfully. 

Creating marriage goals is less about ‘arriving’ somewhere and more about coming together as a team. The more you think of this process as a way to be unified, the more your marriage will prosper. 

Access the Save Your Marriage Workbook.