The Best Relationship Goals To Share With Your Perfect Match

What are relationship goals?

Relationship goals are exactly what they sound like – goals for couples that they want to achieve to improve or progress in their relationship. They can apply to any part of your life, such as sexual, financial, career, or health. They can also be rational, such as budgeting together and saving for retirement, or emotional, like prioritizing each other on a daily basis. 

There is an alternative meaning to the term, where phrases “relationship goals” and “couple goals” mean that the couple seems perfect, and they’re an excellent example of what a relationship should look like. 

Why do you need relationship goals?

Setting relationship goals is highly beneficial for couples. Not only is it a great bonding exercise, but it’s also a fun and efficient way to form new habits. If you two are working on something together, you get motivated by the other person, and they’re preventing you from giving up. As your goals start to become a reality, you’ll be more satisfied with the union. And the process of getting to the goal itself will also boost your satisfaction with the relationship.

In addition to that, relationship goal-setting:

• Gives your relationship a sense of purpose 
• Helps improve communication
• Encourages collaboration 
• Strengthens emotional intimacy 
• Makes fighting and conflicts more sustainable
• Boosts resilience against romantic crises 
• Manages expectations 

Overall, relationship goals are great. They’re an important element of growing together as a couple, helping both partners see the progress they’re making, and appreciating how far they’ve come together. 

Examples of relationship goals

There are endless possibilities when it comes to relationship goals. 

You can come up with a list of categories and think of goals for each category, for example: 

• Physical (exercise together regularly, try a new sport every year, compete in a tournament)
• Psychological (go to couples or individual therapy, work out one’s character flaws)
• Spiritual (go to church together every Sunday, writing scriptures every morning before work)
• Sexual (experiment with toys and positions, try our new sex locations, have sex regularly, look for new ways to give each other orgasms, work out any tension around the topic)
• Family (homebuying, planning kids, taking care of the elderly in the family)
• Financial (saving up for retirement or an emergency, paying off debt, setting up a college fund for the kids)
• Romance (going on dates every week, spending time just the two of you on the weekends, coming up with cute little traditions, agreeing to talk on the phone at least once a day if you’re doing a long-distance relationship, taking the slow dating route if one of you is not fully ready to commit 100%)
• Travel (planning trips far out, agreeing on top desired destinations and things to do there)

Alternatively, you can simply make a list of what’s important to you both, without thinking too much about where they fit on the category spectrum. 

Here are some relationship goals ideas: 

• Not going to bed angry at each other, no matter how big of a fight you had. 
• Changing the way you fight in general. For example, banning silent treatment or shifting the focus from winning the argument to coming to a good solution together. 
• Having sex in a new spot every week to keep the fire going in your sexual life.  
• No-phones policy at dinners to maintain a romantic atmosphere. 
• Agreeing to let go of specific little habits or patterns that you’re bothered with but that are not important in the grand scheme of things, such as them leaving empty cups all over the house.
• Scheduling time just for the two of you every week. This might not seem like the sexiest or most romantic thing ever, but the truth is – unless something is planned, it’s not very likely to happen. 
• Creating a safe zone where you’re not judging each other and can share anything and everything. This can be something you commit to 24/7, or come up with a fun routine, like a meeting in the pantry – anytime you go there to discuss something, you can be open and honest, and the other person promises to be supportive. 

How to set relationship goals with your partner?

Now, if you’ve never set goals in a relationship, you might struggle a bit at the beginning. But trust us, if you guys have a sincere emotional bond and you are confident in your relationship, setting goals together will be fun and helpful.  

For starters, have a deep talk about your relationship. Where are you now, and where do you see yourselves going? What are some of the big milestones you see on the horizon and are ready to tackle together? What do you guys adore about each other and what bothers you? How can you work out any misunderstandings? 

This can be nerve-wracking to cover all these topics and it will require vulnerability from both of you, but it’s totally worth it. Not only will it bring you closer, but it will help you come up with relationship goals that you could have forgotten about otherwise. 

Next, get into the right mindset. Relationship goals should foster emotional intimacy and help you move on to the next stages of the relationship. It’s important that you don’t treat it like a chore, but rather something that’s enriching for both of you and will help you fall in love even more. 

SMART goals 

Coming to you straight from the corporate world – SMART goals. If you’re both focused on achieving your relationship goals, try applying the SMART goals principle to some of them.

SMART stands for:

S - Specific

M - Measurable

A - Attainable R - Relevant T - Time-bound

For example, if you have a child and want them to be able to go to a good university, you can plan to build up a trust fund for their education. 

Following the SMART principles, your goal can look like this:

• Specific: save $300, 000 by the time the child is 16.
• Measurable: you have the end number in mind, measure yourself by it. 
• Attainable: $300K is realistic, because you both make over $80K a year and can dedicate at least $10K a year to investing, and your child is only 1 year old right now.
• Relevant: you already have a child and they’ll need education in the future. 
• Time-bound: there’s a countdown to them being of age they’ll need to pay the tuition. 

SMART goal-setting is brilliant, but it won’t work with all relationship goals. Following this formula for your sex plans, for example, would be questionable, and a total buzz kill. 

Tips for setting goals in a relationship 

Relationship goals are helpful in building a healthy and fulfilling relationship, but how you plan those goals matters too. We at Once want you to make the most of this exercise, so here are some tips that will help you navigate the process:

1. Bring up the topic in person. Don’t send them a text in the dating chat or address it on a phone call. It’s an important and intimate subject, and it deserves to be handled with you both present.
2. Have some alone thinking time before you come together to discuss and plan your goals. This will ensure neither of you gets swamped with the other person’s goals and forgets about their own wishes.  
3. Make sure you both support each goal you’re agreeing on. The number one rule of mindful dating is to never pressure someone into doing what they don’t really feel like doing. This is especially important if your partner has people-pleasing tendencies. 
4. Come up with some sort of a tracker to gamify the process, plus make sure you don’t forget about the goals you set. This can be a piece of paper with checkboxes that you put on the fridge and check a box once you’ve made one step towards achieving the goal.
5. Be firm but also flexible. Just like with New Year resolutions, some goals become obsolete as time progresses. In other cases, you find that the pace that you’ve picked up for the goal is either too fast or too slow. It’s also possible that your circumstances change half way through. All of those changes can and should be accommodated. There’s no reason to stick to something that’s no longer serving you. 
6. Do NOT look at other couples as examples for your relationship goals. Okay, maybe you can view them as inspiration a little bit, but don’t go crazy. Nara and Lucky Smith are incredibly famous and are trending as the ultimate it-couple on TikTok. This doesn’t mean that you should strive and replicate everything they do. You might be inspired by their dedication to raising kids, but don’t think that you must pop out at least 3 babies immediately and start making everything from scratch to break even with them. The goals must be yours, and they need to work for YOUR relationship.