The Pina Colada Song

This week, I’ve been thinking about life visions and how they affect our romantic relationships. (I know. You’re shocked that I want to revisit this relationship thing, aren’t you?) Single or not, there exist perils that threaten our best opportunities to Live in Relationship-Joy. Given that none of my single friends seem to be any happier than any of my long-term, married friends, and vice-versa, my question is: is there any way to ensure that we experience our own best-life-we-can-imagine, either with or without a significant other?

It seems like, if we are single, we are all too willing to sacrifice some pieces of what we envision as our best life, just to feel some kind of sense of love and belonging. I certainly have done that. In fact, while in one of my most long-term relationships, I sacrificed my perfect financial picture, my ideal home, my spiritual dedication, my community camaraderie, and my health (or at least my safety). Why? Because I felt loved, needed, and important. I had met my relationship goals at the cost of all other dreams. Often, as I watch some of my girlfriends start to date someone new, they ask themselves, “Can I or can I not live with this man?” I hear answers like, “You’ve got to take the good with the bad,” and “No relationship is perfect.” True. But how close to your dream-life are you? And what’s close enough?

While single people are giving-up pieces of their best visions in order to couple, people who are in committed relationships are uncoupling in order to retrieve their claim to their best visions. I am reminded of my parents, who divorced after 23 years of marriage, because they were “very different people.” Not long after their divorce, each of them was spending as much time as they could on the water. My mom was shocked to hear that my dad was sailing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and my dad was shocked to hear that my mom was sailing to the Dry Tortugas. As it turned out, their lives remained fairly parallel for years after their divorce, because they, apparently, were not as “different,” in their individual concepts of how to live the "most beautiful life" as they had once thought. Of course, focused instead on their day to day struggles, they had never successfully talked about what they both really wanted. (Is anyone else hearing the 1970’s “Pina Colada Song,” right now?)

It would seem, then, that one of the most important things we can do with any partner or potential partner is talk about these visions, these dreams of what life would look like if it could look like anything we choose. I wonder how much less compromising we would do while we were single and dating, if we knew up-front that the person across the table from us was on a completely different dream page. On the other hand, if we knew that our visions of what makes life worth living were parallel, could we overlook the way he holds his fork, or the fact that she has a checkered table cloth on her kitchen table? (Really. These are actual reasons why second dates have not occurred.) And I wonder how much more joy we could experience within our current committed relationships if we knew how many of our dreams were shared. Imagine the synergy of having two distinct people working together toward that perfect-life vision… toward your perfect-life vision!

At the very least, and to avoid certain heartbreak, isn’t it worth asking the question, “What would you be, have and do, if you believed you could be, have and do anything at all?” Of course, if you ask that question you need to be able to answer the question, yourself. So, can you?