The Annual Date to Have With Your Spouse to Make Goals a Reality

Your sign that your next hot date is in your local library

I had big plans for this first post of the new year. I set strict boundaries for rest and gave myself a week to write. O and I had this very date I’m going to be diving into in this post on Monday and he said “so you have the rest of the week to get this post together and get back in the groove.”

Instead, I started to feel sick halfway through the date and by the middle of the night, I knew the norovirus we’d dodged for years had finally gotten me.

I’m going to be gentle with myself here since I can still only look at screens for a short period of time, but I’m so grateful for your patience and support to allow such a generous break here on the gold standard. A few weeks really does feel like a few months and I’m thrilled for what 2025 has in store for this space.

Now onto the juice.

No. 67: Easy Come, Easy Go | Goal Setting for the Begrudging, the Hesitant, and the Terrified.

Every January, O and I head to our local library for one of our favorite dates of the year: our family reflection and goal setting meeting. This May, we’ll celebrate 14 years of marriage. That’s not fifty years, but it is a lot of years. Early on, we’d each jot down a few goals in our notebooks and just rattle them off to one another over breakfast or something. Mine were heavily fitness, art and school related since I was finishing college and his were mostly career related as he was playing in the NFL. We’d set spiritual goals to work towards together and that was that.

The problem was, I never really looked at my lavish, admirable goals past mid-January. We were an incredibly disciplined couple heavily focused on our own bodies and tasks so we mostly latched onto whatever felt necessary and possible, allowing our wild travel schedules to dictate our actions and activities rather than the goals. We’d just go with the flow and see how the year would shake out come December.

It was lovely, really. It worked for us. But somewhere along the way, (my guess is somewhere between the autoimmune disease, the whole ‘being a decade older’ thing and the four kids) we realized the whimsical goal system was broken.

Without knowing each other’s goals, we couldn’t help one another achieve them. Without reflecting on whether we came close to or completely missed last year’s goals, we didn’t know how to redirect. Without sharing what felt easy, what felt impossible and what we missed in the past twelve months, we didn’t have a compass for what to do carry with us and what to leave behind.

After a few years of feeling like we weren’t on the same page in our marriage and were a bit lost in our own selves, a tradition was born. This little library date became essential—the lifeline that gives our simple, intentional goals a chance. Here are a few tips to implement this same meeting in your own life.