Every progressive individual needs to make an effort to achieve one notable milestone at least once a year. Your milestones are basically small steps towards a greater goal that you wish to achieve. As a married couple you have basically become one entity and you therefore have the responsibility of ensuring you have one or more notable milestones recorded for every year. Your milestones do not necessarily need to be the achievement of an objective, it could be the first step towards a major accomplishment such as getting pregnant, saving for an investment or a religious undertaking. You can mark a milestone in any way as long as it is positive, geared towards your bigger goals in life and most important, it must be owned by both of you.
Regardless of the many significant milestones you may manage to achieve as an individual, only the milestones that you achieve together with your spouse can be useful as cornerstones for your marriage. In most relationships there are disparities in education, finances, physical strength and many other areas. Your personal exploits in any field will do little to help grow your relationship. In fact they are likely to increase the disparity between you and your spouse which could contribute to differences. While it is important and a must to pursue your personal development, you need to ensure that personal pursuits do not cause you to forget your obligation to achieve shared milestones.
While you may find great satisfaction in climbing to the top of a mountain, that personal milestone will achieve less for your marriage as compared to taking your first 30 minute walk as a couple with your spouse. The walk is obviously not as challenging or glorifying as climbing the mountain but it can become an important milestone in your relationship. Your business could also grow significantly in one year to the point of employing 50 or more people, however, that achievement will do little for your relationship as compared to the joint contribution you make as a couple towards the running of a local children’s home.
There are a number of factors that make shared milestones a lot more important and useful for your marriage. The first factor is that a shared milestone involves sharing! Man and woman come together primarily for companionship. In the modern society, we have a lot of personal business going on and very little in the way of shared interests and time. Having a shared milestone will therefore result from shared time, shared ideas, shared challenges, shared visions and a lot of other shared things. At the end of it all, the milestone will be born of sharing, the main reason for getting married.
Another important factor that makes a common milestone greater and more useful is that is proof of your effectiveness as a team. For many couples, the wedding ceremony and the birth of children are the only common milestone they can list after years of marriage. Everything else is an individual effort which is assigned to one party because it is their responsibility. In such a situation, the couple has no real accomplishments as a couple and they do not know the joy of a shared achievement. Achieving shared milestones is proof to the couple that they make a great team and with enough practice, your attempts of achieving milestones together will become a habit that will propel you to success in many areas of your married life.
Couples also need shared milestones to help them respect and appreciate each other’s individual achievements. In the process of pursuing a common goal, you and your spouse will get to see aspects of each other that would otherwise remain unknown. As you apply your strengths and fight your challenges alongside each other, many truths become revealed. You get to see the personal challenges that your partner has had to overcome in their professional and personal life so as to achieve the milestones they have achieved as an individual. You get to see your partner tested in areas such as attention deficiencies, facing phobias, physical challenges, cultural and religious beliefs and a lot more. It can be quite an eye opener to discover your superstar spouse is actually fighting personal challenges every day at a job they seem extremely competent at.
There are many other reasons that make a shared milestone worth a lot more than the individual achievements you may manage. To enjoy the numerous benefits that shared milestones bring to a relationship, you and your spouse need to set out on a journey towards achieving a significant milestone that you can use as a cornerstone upon which you build the next level of your relationship.
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