Climbing Wall: The Joint Marital Life Plan

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Create a Master Plan for Your Marriage

Most couples don’t think about having a master plan for their marriage. They should! A marriage without direction does nothing to protect it from the unavoidable challenges that happen in life. The more prepared a couple is, the better their chances are of staying happily married. The easy way to create a plan for your marriage is to use a climbing wall as an analogy for the path your marriage will take.

The Climbing Wall

Imagine an indoor climbing wall that covers the entire four walls of a room. There are handles, seemingly randomly placed, to grab or place your feet as you climb. Dotted along the top of the walls, you see bells for people to ring when they scale to the top, celebrating their accomplishments.

To climb the wall successfully, a person doesn’t just grab the first rock and go up. Instead, the climber stands back and strategizes. They see different color markings that signify different paths of varying difficulties. They make a note of how far the rocks are spaced, whether the wall is straight, or if it has a hangover that requires more thought to navigate. In the planning, they assess not only the possible routes but which tools they will need to be successful.

Climbing With A Partner

If climbing with a partner, both people stand at the base of the wall and plan out how they will work together to reach their goals. They may decide to use the Balay technique, where one person climbs first, and the other stands on the ground below, skillfully managing the climber’s ropes that dangle down. While it may look like the partner on the floor isn’t doing much, the one climbing heavily relies on their contribution to the success of the climb. It is a critical role because it protects the climber from falling if he loses grip.

In a marriage, it helps to apply this climbing strategy to make the direction of your relationship successful. The chart below will help you get started. You will find categories of common areas of a person’s life. An essential part of this exercise is for a couple to write out three goals—detailed goals in each area for the husband, detailed goals for the wife, and detailed goals for the marriage. All are equally important because each is critical for each person to have a feeling of contribution, affirmation, and fulfillment of their needs and goals.

Directions

Print out three copies of this worksheet—one for you, your partner, and a third copy for later. Each spouse should fill in only their particular goals under their column as well as the goals for the marriage from your perspective only. Do not complete any part of the form for your partner. Give yourselves one week to complete. Write goals using the SMART method (Specific-Measurable-Attainable-Realistic-Timely). Each category asks you to rank how important you feel about each using a scale of 1-8, with one being “not important” to eight being “very important.

Do not discuss your respective worksheets until you come together the following week. At this time, take turns discussing your two columns. This is not a time to disagree, correct, or criticize what your partner writes. It’s a time to listen and pay attention to significant differences in how important each of you rank/value each category. If there is more than a 4 point difference, you need to discuss what is creating that. For instance, let’s say a husband ranks spirituality as an 8 and the wife gives it a 2. That is a red flag that that area of your life could have conflict. If this has been an area of stress in your marriage, you need to discuss ways to bring the numbers closer. Other times, extreme opposites are not an issue, and it’s is a neutral area. This might be a husband who runs 8 miles a day, and his wife prefers to watch TV as her sport. If it’s a non-issue, search your categories for areas that have caused problems in the past.

After you discuss your goals for yourself and the marriage, take a blank copy of the goal sheet and create a master plan for how each person can achieve their goals and the goals for the marriage. Just like the rock-climbing couple who stands in front of the wall and plans how they will navigate the wall, you need to do the same.

While doing this exercise, expect a lot of give and take from each of you. Plotting out goals on a masterplan is not easy. You may want to prioritize each person’s goals in terms of most important to least. From there, work on one goal at a time. Figure out the steps you need to take, the resources you need, and what role each of you need to take in helping both partners meet their goals. This could take a few weeks to complete. Once done, both of you have clear expectations for going forward.

It can also help to write your goals out on index cards and arrange them on a table to see how you can make them work. It may be the wife’s goal is to have a child, but the husband feels they need to grow their finances first. In this case, going back to the climbing wall, she may decide to move laterally on the climbing wall while the husband spends two years putting money away. In two years, he feels secure with the finances, and her goals are met.

[What are your goals? Write each using the SMART technique (Specific-Measurable-Attainable-Realistic-Timely)]