So you’re fighting about different life goals. Let me tell you what I actually hear when someone says that to me.
Most of the time, when couples come to me with “we want different things,” what’s really happening underneath is not a logistics problem. It’s an attachment problem wearing a logistics costume.
Here’s what I mean. When your partner says they want to move to another city and you don’t, or they want kids and you’re not sure, or their career is pulling them one direction and yours another, the conversation almost immediately stops being about the actual goal. It becomes about something much older and much scarier. It becomes about, “Am I a priority to you?” and “Is there room for me in your world?” and “Are you going to leave me behind?”
That’s the real fight. The life goals are just where the fight is happening.
Now, I’m not dismissing the practical reality. Sometimes there are genuine incompatibilities that need to be looked at honestly. I’m not going to blow smoke at you and say love conquers all logistical differences. It doesn’t always.
But before you can even have a clear-eyed conversation about whether your actual goals are compatible, you have to first interrupt the cycle you’re both stuck in. Because right now, what’s most likely happening is this: One of you is pushing harder for their vision, and the other is feeling controlled or left out or like they don’t matter, and they’re either fighting back or pulling away. And the harder one pushes, the more the other one digs in or disappears. And you’re both interpreting that as confirmation of your worst fear about each other.
That’s not two people with different life goals. That’s two people terrified they’re not going to be chosen.
What I’d want to do with you, and with your partner ideally, is slow the whole thing down and ask each of you, not “what do you want to do with your life?” but “what are you most afraid is going to happen here?” Because I promise you, underneath each person’s position on the life goal question, there is a very scared, very young part of them that is trying to make sure they don’t get hurt.
When you can both see that, when you can move from “we want different things” to “we’re both terrified of losing each other and we’re expressing it in completely opposite ways,” that’s when the conversation about the actual goals becomes possible for the first time.
That shift, from two separate suffering bubbles into one shared story you’re both living inside, that’s what I’d be working toward with you. That’s where the Sovereign Us lives. And it’s only from that place, where you’re genuinely on the same team protecting the relationship rather than protecting yourselves from each other, that you can make a real decision about the future together.
The question isn’t just “do we want the same things?” The question is “can we be brave enough to find out what we’re each actually scared of, together?”
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How to Stop Fighting and Start Communicating in Your Relationship
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