By the Year 2017…

In the summer of 2005, Martha and I were living in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, with two of our three children, and starting to think about coming back home to the United States. Martha’s four-year expatriate contract with an international bank would be coming to an end in a year’s time, our eldest daughter was getting married the following year and our middle daughter was getting ready for her freshman year at a university in Boston.

One afternoon as we were sitting down to have a conversation about our future, Martha said, “Let’s create a collage.” My first thought was, “No, let’s not. That’s a stupid idea.” After a short time of recalcitrance on my part, I succumbed to her obvious enthusiasm. We pulled out magazines, paste, scissors and a piece of poster board we had in the closet. As we looked through the magazines, we began tearing out and sharing pictures with each other that represented our shared life together. These pictures depicted images of the kind of life we enjoy and what’s important to us. After we cut out the pictures and pasted them on the poster board, we put the collage up on the mantelpiece.

With the collage as a framework for our planning, we started talking about, “What’s next in our lives?” We chose the year 2017, a twelve-year period, in which we could envision what we’d like to accomplish together. Twelve years was a long time, long enough so life wasn’t necessarily predictable and long enough for us to take a big view of our relationship.

We shared what we each wanted to accomplish individually as well as what we wanted to have together. Our vision also included what we hoped for our three adult children, knowing full well that their lives were theirs to determine. We had a conversation for about an hour and then typed up what we had envisioned in a Word document that started with the phrase, “By the year 2017…”

Last week, I found that document in one of the folders in my computer, labeled “Our Future 2017.” I hadn’t seen it in 8 years. There were items on the list that we had clearly accomplished and there were items that, while not yet fulfilled, are still completely possible in the next four years. I showed Martha and we smiled broad smiles together. Here are some of the accomplishments we had envisioned on that day in Amsterdam and have since been fulfilled:

• We own a home in Boston
• Martha earned her Ph.D. degree
• We have continued to vacation at Squam Lake in New Hampshire
• Andy has written a book on partnership marriage
• We have a network of friends and colleagues all over the world
• Martha has worked with many international organizations
• Andy has worked with many couples, individually and in workshops
• We’re involved in many collaborative projects together
• We have continued to travel the world

We no longer have the collage we made that day. We regret that it was lost (discarded?) in our move to Boston. In another document, I had saved some of the words that described the quality of life that those images had called forth: Playfulness, being together, beauty, adventure, mystery, inspiration and wisdom. I thanked Martha for her brilliant idea of creating a collage together that day in 2005. It will be soon be time for us to create another one!

Posted in Partnership Marriage